Oratorio di San Lorenzo

The Oratorio di San Lorenzo, built around fifteen seventy by the Compagnia di San Francesco, stands in the Kalsa district of Palermo as a dense, ornate interior of stucco and marble. The fraternity originally constructed this space upon the site of an older church to manage the burials of the neighborhood’s poor. Its walls are defined by the late seventeenth-century work of Giacomo Serpotta, whose detailed, swirling figures and putti decorate the room alongside ten larger statues representing Christian virtues.