The story
Behind the high altar of this basilica, just outside the old walls of Syracuse, hangs the canvas Caravaggio painted here in 1608, soon after he escaped from prison in Malta. The city's senate commissioned it for this very building, which stands where tradition places the martyrdom and burial of Lucy, the patron saint of Syracuse, in the early 4th century.
So the subject is a burial. Two huge gravediggers fill the front of the picture, digging, while the saint lies on the ground behind them and a small group of mourners gathers beneath a tall, bare wall that takes up the whole upper half.
For years the painting was somewhere else. In 2011 it was moved, for conservation reasons, to Santa Lucia alla Badia, a church in the old town on the island of Ortigia, and it stayed there for nine years. After a loan to the Mart museum in Rovereto, which paid for its restoration, it returned in 2020 and now stands on an anti-seismic support behind the altar.
Next to the basilica is a small octagonal chapel over the site of Lucy's tomb, designed in the 17th century by the Syracusan architect Giovanni Vermexio, and early Christian catacombs run beneath the whole site.
