Architettura e prospettiva: la rinascita barocca del complesso di Santa Maria della Grotta a Marsala

This paper studies and evaluates the design strategies pursued by the architect Giovanni Amico from Trapani at the beginning of his promising career during the reconstruction of the monumental complex of Santa Maria della Grotta in Marsala (starting in 1714), which belonged to the Jesuits of Palermo. This building is notable for being excavated in an ancient Latomia-necropolis and characterized by the juxtaposition of underground medieval environments, with remnants of rock paintings, and a new church in the Baroque style. This architecture is little known and studied, currently in a state of ruin, and lacks adequate contemporary source. The new design of the sacred building and its context possesses compositional and environmental peculiarities that appear exceptional in the Sicilian context and deserve further study. The investigation, through the comparison between the disciplines of history and representation, focused primarily on identifying and interpreting the engraved sources reworked by the architect, who never traveled and trained through books, to overcome the project limitations imposed by the preexisting structure and achieve a theatrical quality of architecture. The presbytery’s roofing solution, the articulation of the blind nave’s walls, and engraved traces in perspective of a monumental and unfinished portal in the concave facade have offered new interpretative keys to the project.