Stucco is plaster, sand and marble dust. It costs little, it works fast, and for centuries it served to imitate what you could not afford: if you have no money for marble, you make stucco and paint it white.
In Palermo, between 1680 and 1730, one man took this makeshift material and made rooms with it that marble could not have made. Giacomo Serpotta did not imitate sculpture: he exploited the fact that stucco is modelled with the fingers while still wet, and filled whole walls with life-size figures, children clambering over the cornices and hangings that look like real cloth.
There are three oratories, all within ten minutes’ walk of one another, and almost no two-day itinerary includes them. To my mind they are the most surprising thing in Palermo, and this article explains why.
What an oratory is, and why there are so many
Why does Palermo have so many oratories that hardly anyone knows about? An oratory is not a church: it is the meeting room of a confraternity, an association of laymen who gathered to pray, to do charitable work and, very concretely, to count for something in the city.
In Palermo between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the confraternities were numerous, rich and in competition with each other. Each wanted the finest room, and the room was not meant to resemble a church: it was meant to resemble a nobleman’s drawing room, with benches along the walls and an altarpiece at the end.
That is where Serpotta’s freedom comes from. He was not decorating a place of worship under a bishop’s control: he was furnishing the reception room of a group of gentlemen, and he could afford the half-naked girls, the mischievous putti and the theatrical hangings.
Who Serpotta was
Giacomo Serpotta was born in Palermo on 10 March 1656 and died there on 27 February 1732. He came from a family of stucco workers, worked almost always in the city, and in all likelihood never left Sicily.
It is worth bearing in mind as you look at his rooms, because their elegance is that of the Roman sculpture of his day, which he had not seen: he knew it from prints and drawings, and remade it in plaster.
He worked almost exclusively for the confraternities, over fifty years: the oratory of Santa Cita occupied him at length, that of San Lorenzo between 1699 and 1706, that of the Rosary in San Domenico around 1710-1717.
The technique, which is why it looks like marble
Why do these figures look like marble and not plaster? Because for the most part they are not even bare plaster.
Serpotta used a finishing technique, allustratura, which consists of spreading over the still-damp surface a very fine mixture of marble dust and lime, then polishing it at length with a spatula. The result is a smooth, slightly translucent skin that catches the light like polished marble.
The advantage of stucco, though, was not the cost: it was the speed. Marble is taken away and cannot be put back, and every figure takes months. Stucco is added, corrected, modelled by hand for as long as it stays damp. That is why Serpotta could afford dozens of figures per room, each in a different pose, and why his putti have legs that jut into the air and drapery that flies: things that in marble would snap.
Santa Cita: the battle of Lepanto made of plaster
The Oratory of the Rosary in Santa Cita is where Serpotta’s hand is freest, and the entrance wall is the thing that leaves you speechless.
At the centre is an enormous relief of the battle of Lepanto, the victory of the Christian fleet over the Ottomans in 1571, which for a Rosary confraternity was its own feast day: tradition credited that victory to the recitation of the rosary. There are the galleys, the smoke of the cannon, the bodies in the water, all in white, all projecting from the wall.
Around it runs the complete repertoire: teatrini, small scenes set into the wall like miniature stages, with their stucco curtains pulled back by putti; allegorical statues of women seated on the cornices, with the attributes of the virtues; and dozens of children who climb, sleep and play with the festoons.
Look at the putti one by one: no two are doing the same thing, and several look straight at you.
San Lorenzo, and the empty place on the altar
The Oratory of San Lorenzo is considered the most balanced of the three: the stuccoes date from 1699-1706, and here Serpotta alternates white with gold in a measure he does not look for in the other two.
The walls tell the stories of Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis in eight teatrini, with allegorical statues between them and putti everywhere. But the thing this room is known for all over the world is not by Serpotta, and it is no longer here.
What is missing from this room? On the altar stood the Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis of Assisi by Caravaggio, painted in 1600. On the night of 17 to 18 October 1969 it was stolen, cut from its frame, and it has never been recovered. It is still on the FBI’s list of the ten most important art thefts in the world, and dozens of contradictory accounts of its fate have been collected, almost all of Mafia origin and none of them verified.
Since 12 July 2015 the altar has held a full-size reproduction, made by Factum Arte from historical photographs and scientific analysis, and installed at a ceremony attended by the President of the Republic.
It should be looked at knowing what it is. It is not the painting, and it is the closest thing to the painting anyone can see: the room around it, on the other hand, is still entirely there.
The Rosary in San Domenico, and the Van Dyck that left for Genoa
The third, the Oratory of the Rosary in San Domenico, has the latest stuccoes, 1710-1717, and it is the one where Serpotta works alongside a first-rate painting rather than in place of one.
On the altar is the Madonna of the Rosary with Saints by Anthony van Dyck, of 1628. The painting’s history says a good deal about the seventeenth century: van Dyck was in Palermo when the plague broke out in 1624, fled to Genoa, and finished the picture there before shipping it to Sicily.
Around it Serpotta deploys his allegorical statues, and here they are his most celebrated: standing female figures, with drapery that falls like wet cloth, leaning on brackets as though waiting for somebody. Among them is Charity, the most photographed figure in his entire output.
How to visit them, and in what order
The three oratories all lie in the area between the Vucciria and via Roma, within ten minutes’ walk of each other, and each takes half an hour.
The order I suggest is Santa Cita, San Domenico, San Lorenzo: you begin with the most exuberant room, move to the one with the Van Dyck, and end with the most balanced, which is also the one the story of the theft weighs on.
Warning: this is the stop most easily lost, because the oratories close on Tuesday and keep shorter hours in winter. Plan the visit around their split opening hours rather than leaving it until the end of the day.
If you are building an itinerary, the oratories take the late afternoon of the first day in What to see in Palermo in 2 days.
Practical information
Checked on 3 September 2026 on the channels of the sacred art circuit that runs the visits. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel, and in particular the winter timetable, which is four hours shorter.
Tickets. A 6-euro ticket covers the Oratory of Santa Cita and the Oratory of the Rosary in San Domenico, reduced to 5; either one alone costs 4 euros. The Oratory of San Lorenzo has its own box office: 3 euros full and 2 reduced. All three belong to a circuit in which a ticket to one venue entitles you to reduced entry at the others.
Opening hours. Santa Cita and the Rosary in San Domenico open, from 1 March to 31 October, every day except Tuesday from 10 am to 1.30 pm and from 2 pm to 6 pm; from 1 November to 28 February, again except Tuesday, from 9 am to 1.30 pm and from 2 pm to 5 pm. The Oratory of San Lorenzo keeps hours of its own and opens every day from 10 am to 6 pm, closing only on 25 December and 15 August.
Where they are. The Oratory of Santa Cita is in via Valverde, the Oratory of the Rosary in San Domenico in via dei Bambinai, the Oratory of San Lorenzo in via dell’Immacolatella, beside the church of San Francesco d’Assisi. Between the first and the last is a ten-minute walk.
How long it takes. Half an hour per oratory, an hour and a half for all three including the walking.
Photo credits: stuccoes by Giacomo Serpotta in the oratories of Santa Cita, San Lorenzo and the Rosary in San Domenico, and the Rosary altar, photographs by Fabrizio Garrisi; Charity by Davide Mauro; van Dyck’s Madonna of the Rosary, photograph by Effems (CC BY-SA 4.0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
