Skulls on the doorway, skeletons on the wooden door: the most unusual façade in the city – and by no means meant as a shock effect.
What you see
The Church of Purgatory stands on Via Ridola and catches the eye at once. Its eighteenth-century façade is decorated with skulls and bones; the two-leaf wooden door shows, in carved panels, skeletons and souls in the fire. Two kinds of skull can be told apart – crowned and uncrowned: death makes no distinction between the powerful and the poor.
Why it is like this
The images are a programme, not decoration. The church belonged to a confraternity that prayed for the souls in purgatory. The depictions were meant to recall mortality and to prompt prayer for the dead – a visual language common in the baroque, carried through here with unusual consistency.
It fits a city where dealings with death were visible anyway: the draining niches in San Pietro Barisano are only a few hundred metres away.
Inside
Compared with the façade the interior is restrained: an oval plan, stucco decoration, side altars. If you expect drama after the door, you find calm – that too is part of the concept.
Setting
The church stands on the museum street of the upper town, between the archaeological museum and Palazzo Lanfranchi. You will pass it anyway; two minutes in front of the door are worth it even when it is closed.
Read on
- Via Ridola – the street it stands on
- Churches in Matera – the overview
- Museo Ridola – the museum next door
