An Interrupted History. The Unfinished Façade of the Mother Church of Adrano in Sicily

This contribution concerns the construction history of the Mother Church of Adrano, which, at least since the mid-eighteenth century, has been the subject of a long sequence of modernization and completion works. The most significant interventions discussed over time have focused on the roofing of the transept, the redefinition of the church’s interior decorative scheme, and, above all, the transformation of the façade, flanked by a squat and currently incomplete bell tower. By integrating information drawn from archival documents preserved at the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage of Catania and the Parish Archive, as well as from a substantial body of graphic material and a detailed architectural survey of the building, this study seeks to formulate reconstructive hypotheses regarding the most significant episode in this sequence: the project—never completed—for a new façade-bell tower designed by the Milanese architect Carlo Sada in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Finally, the development of solutions for virtual visualization aims to provide tools for the analysis of this design and contribute to strengthening the foundations of the ongoing, though currently dormant, debate surrounding the unresolved façade.