From 1875 onwards, in the heart of Palermo’s historic centre, an entire neighbourhood was radically redesigned to make way for a symbol destined to embody modernity and the rise of the Italian middle class: the Teatro Massimo, which was inaugurated with great pomp on 16 May 1897. Within a few years, four religious complexes – San Francesco alle Stimmate, San Giuliano, Sant’Agata alle Mura and Santa Marta – along with their architecture, art collections and communities deeply rooted in the local area. Yet not everything was lost. Through a critical reinterpretation of the events and the analysis of unpublished archival sources, traces emerge of an extraordinary heritage that had long remained scattered.

Works, fragments and memories resurface from a history of only apparent obliteration: a case in point is Giacomo Serpotta’s extraordinary stucco work, now preserved at the Oratorio dei Bianchi, bearing witness to an artistic legacy which, though stripped of its original context, continues to recount the complexity of that transformation.

The conference thus offers, exactly 129 years after the inauguration of the Teatro Massimo, a fresh perspective on one of the most profound urban metamorphoses of nineteenth-century Palermo, bringing to light what existed before the Teatro Massimo and restoring a voice to an urban, artistic and human fabric which, though transformed, continues to live on in its traces and in the city’s memory.

Flaminia Ferlito is an art historian and holds a PhD in Analysis and Management of Artistic Heritage from the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca. Her research focuses on Italy’s religious heritage, with particular attention to the ways in which it was managed, protected, dispersed and introduced into the international art market in the period following the unification of Italy. During her research in 2025, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Hertziana Library in Rome, in the department headed by Tanja Michalsky, where she was able to study the complex relationships surrounding the demolition of religious complexes to make way for the construction of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. In 2024, she was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York, whilst in 2023 she served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

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