Oratorio di San Lorenzo

The Oratorio di San Lorenzo features an interior completely smothered in white stucco figures carved by Giacomo Serpotta in the late seventeenth century. These playful, life-sized statues twist and lean from the walls, portraying saints and allegorical figures in a wild display of texture. In nineteen sixty-nine, the oratory became the center of a major crime when thieves cut Caravaggio’s Nativity painting from its frame. The masterpiece vanished, leaving behind only the empty, ornate wooden space that now sits beneath the stucco angels.