Page 110 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Oratorio di San Lorenzo

Via Immacolatella 5 • Mon–Sat 9am–5pm • €2
To the side of San Francesco d’Assisi, the renowned Oratorio di San Lorenzo
contains another of Giácomo Serpotta’s stuccoed masterpieces, namely intricately

fashioned scenes from the lives of St Lawrence and St Francis. However the Oratorio
is best known for one of Caravaggio’s most dynamic and perfectly preserved
canvases, Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, stolen in 1969 and never
recovered. There have been several attempts to establish the whereabouts of the
painting, though in 2009, Mafia pentito Gaspare Spatuzza claimed that in the 1980s it

had been given to one of Palermo’s leading Mafia families, who then hid it in a stable,
where it was nibbled to shreds by rats and pigs, then burned.