The town - Santa Ninfa
Santa Ninfa is situated between Segesta and Selinunte, 410 mt high above sea level. It is born as a feudal village at the beginning of the XVII century but it assumed the structure of a real build-up area only in 1609, when Luigi Arias Giardina bought the zone becoming Marquis of it. It was him to give the name to the town, dedicating it to the Martyr Saint of Palermo, which it takes name from.
In this period also the most of churches and of the monuments forming its historic and artistic heritage rose. Unfortunately yet many of them got loose during the violent earthquake that upset the whole the Belice in 1968 and that destroyed the town almost totally. The restoration works succeeded to save the church of Purgatorio (Purgatory) and that one of Badia. The first, with the neo-renaissance face and the inside with nave and two aisles, preserves some seventeenth and eighteenth-century Sicilian paintings and some sculpture grapes kept from Mother Church destroyed by the earthquake. Instead the second, more recently build, has a late Baroque style face with a wide tympanum and four pilaster strips. The remarkable geological and geo-morphological interest of the surrounding area has justified the realization of the natural Reserve “Grotta di Santa Ninfa” (Saint Nymph Cave) inside of a chalky table-land in the neighbourhood of the town.
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