Chiesa di San Francesco d'Assisi

An important example of the architecture of the mendicant orders in southern Italy, the church, built between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century on the remains of a previous Romanesque building, belonged to a convent complex, of which the well and part of the cloister remain. The building maintained its original destination until 1806, when, with the arrival of the French, the friars abandoned it. Restored in various phases starting in 1951, it is now used as a multi-purpose hall for events of cultural interest.The church is accessed through a monumental portal of the fourteenth century with Arab-Norman inspired decorations. The building consists of two parts: the hall, a large rectangular room with a trussed roof, and the presbytery, covered by a vault with eight sails. The seventeenth-century high altar is decorated with polychrome marble inlays with phytomorphic, zoomorphic and landscape subjects. The church houses the sarcophagus of Nicola Ruffo di Calabria, dated to 1372 - 1374, valuable work of Neapolitan school sculptors active at the Angevin court.