CHURCH OF SANTA BARBARA

Beneath the vault of the arch of Santa Barbara is the Baroque church of the same name, rebuilt in 1694 by Cardinal Carlo Barberini, commendatory abbot, on the foundations of the old site. It was a small place of worship carved out of a 15th-century private house by the same owner, mindful of the narrow escape from danger during the Malatesta artillery siege of 1461 described in a passage by the Jesuit historian Pietro Gritio in a marble epigraph affixed to the left of the entrance, outside the church).
The interior also houses valuable historical and artistic relics, as well as the holy water stoup with the Barberini coat of arms. The image of the ‘Madonna dell’Olivo’ is also kept inside the Church of St Barbara, in the chapel on the right in the old quarterdeck, already venerated as miraculous and moved here in the early 19th century together with the epigraph, after having been cut from the wall of an original rural aedicule and then kept for more than a century in the peripheral Church of St Roch. The jewels of the church, however, are the French prints of the Stations of the Cross, the ‘St. Anthony Abbot’ (a painting by an unknown author, with a schematic representation of the village of Barbara, where the old Romanesque church of the Assumption can be recognised on the left), the ‘St. Barbara’ displayed on the high altar by Sebastiano Conca, an esteemed representative of the Roman painting school of the early 18th century, and the ‘Madonna with the Archangel Michael, St Nicholas of Tolentino, St Joseph and St Charles Borromeo’, a mature work by the Venetian Claudio Ridolfi, to which the artist gave a plastic and realistic characterisation. On the side opposite the entrance to the church, the 16th-century stone tablet of local measurements, the oldest of its kind in the Senigalli area, is still affixed to the front of the old municipal building.