La chiesa dei Gesuiti di Noto antica: indagine e ricostruzione digitale

The church of the Jesuit Order in the ancient city of Noto was destroyed, as the rest of the city, by the earthquake that stroke the Oriental part of Sicily in 1693. Thanks to recent researches conducted into the EFIAN Project (Experimental Fruition Ingenious Ancient Noto) it is possible to retrace the complex history of the building, realizing a 3D model of a hypothetical configuration of the complete church as well. The comparison between surveys and archival documents (especially plans preserved at the BnF) revealed also that the church was uncomplete at the date of the earthquake. Moreover, the layout of the ruins doesn’t match with the known drawings of the first half of the XVII century. Analysis of ruins revealed that the Jesuits of Noto intended to build a monumental church, destroying part of an existing building in order to clear space for the new construction. The final building, once achieved, would have been one of the greatest in Sicily, comparable with the church of Jesus of Casa Professa in Palermo.