Description
The Badiazza, the church of Santa Maria della Valle, is a medieval abbey crenellated like a castle, in the bed of a seasonal torrent at the foot of the San Rizzo hills, just outside Messina. Standing alone on the old road across the Peloritani Mountains, it brings together Norman arches, Gothic vaults and a story of queens, kings and legends.
Outside, what strikes you are the battlements crowning the whole building, a true fortress church, and the portal with zigzag-decorated arches, a motif that reached Sicily with the Normans. On the side is a pointed-arch portal with leaf capitals, which scholars have compared to French Gothic.
Inside, a nave and two aisles lead to a raised, unusually large transept with four small galleries at the corners. The rib vaults have two-tone ribs, with alternating blocks of white limestone and black lava. Every capital is different from the others, blending Norman, Cistercian and Burgundian influences.
The dome, perhaps built of light pumice stone, collapsed around 1840. The apses were covered in Byzantine mosaics: a fragment with the head of Saint Peter survives, now in the Regional Museum of Messina.
The name Santa Maria della Scala, which the church took in the Middle Ages, comes from a legend. A ship in the harbour could not set sail until an icon of the Madonna was brought ashore; placed on a cart drawn by heifers with no one guiding them, the image travelled up the torrent bed to the nuns' hermitage.
In 1168 William II and his mother Margaret made it a royal chapel. During the Sicilian Vespers, in 1282, Angevin troops plundered and burned it. In 1303 this is said to be where love blossomed between the young King Frederick III and Eleanor of Anjou, and the central apse showed the two of them donating the church.
Abandoned by the nuns in the 16th century, it fell into ruin. The floods of the 19th century buried it inside and out, and the concrete wall built in the 1950s to protect it from high water now partly hides it.
Outside, what strikes you are the battlements crowning the whole building, a true fortress church, and the portal with zigzag-decorated arches, a motif that reached Sicily with the Normans. On the side is a pointed-arch portal with leaf capitals, which scholars have compared to French Gothic.
Inside, a nave and two aisles lead to a raised, unusually large transept with four small galleries at the corners. The rib vaults have two-tone ribs, with alternating blocks of white limestone and black lava. Every capital is different from the others, blending Norman, Cistercian and Burgundian influences.
The dome, perhaps built of light pumice stone, collapsed around 1840. The apses were covered in Byzantine mosaics: a fragment with the head of Saint Peter survives, now in the Regional Museum of Messina.
The name Santa Maria della Scala, which the church took in the Middle Ages, comes from a legend. A ship in the harbour could not set sail until an icon of the Madonna was brought ashore; placed on a cart drawn by heifers with no one guiding them, the image travelled up the torrent bed to the nuns' hermitage.
In 1168 William II and his mother Margaret made it a royal chapel. During the Sicilian Vespers, in 1282, Angevin troops plundered and burned it. In 1303 this is said to be where love blossomed between the young King Frederick III and Eleanor of Anjou, and the central apse showed the two of them donating the church.
Abandoned by the nuns in the 16th century, it fell into ruin. The floods of the 19th century buried it inside and out, and the concrete wall built in the 1950s to protect it from high water now partly hides it.