Villa Flora (Former Church of Saint Joseph)

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Between 1609 and 1612, at the junction of Via Micelisopo and Via San Giuseppe, the Church dedicated to Saint Joseph was built.

Villa Flora

It is still unclear who commissioned the church—either Baron Gaspare Lucchese, in memory of his father Giuseppe, or the Jesuits, who are also believed to have built the chapel of Saint Joseph on the SP1 Delia-Caltanissetta road (then the route connecting Naro with Caltanissetta, crossing the entire settlement of Delia, today’s Via dei Santi). The aim would have been to establish a church in Delia, their reference town, as it was closer to their convent-farm at Cappellano. The religious building, probably never completed, was nonetheless opened for worship, and the surrounding spaces took the name of the saint: both the square in front of the church and the adjacent street. The latter still bears this name and once connected the churchyard-square with the widening of the canal, a swallow hole for all the town’s rainwater, crossed by the pastoral road from Licata to Palermo. It seems that the church stood at the end of the flat stretch of road linking Piazza Sant’Antonio to the Licata-Palermo road, which near the church narrowed so much that, according to the municipal administration of the time, barely a litter could pass.

At the end of the 19th century, as happened with the Church of La Grazia and the small church of Monserrato, the Church of Saint Joseph was closed and later demolished due to its unsafe condition. After the demolition, a large open space remained, used by the community as Delia’s main square—to the point that for the elderly of the town, when “the square” is mentioned, they refer to this place and not to Piazza Madrice, which is officially the main square. This wide space later became a charming little public garden, called Filora or Flora, and in 1933, during Fascism, a monument dedicated to the war dead was erected at its center. Of the old Church of Saint Joseph, only the foundations and some fragments of the perimeter walls have been found, now completely buried.

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