Santa Chiara is one of Gagliardi's most inventive buildings, with an elliptical plan that creates an interior quite unlike the usual Sicilian Baroque church. The curved walls and the way light falls into the space give it an intimate, dynamic quality. The adjacent convent now sells excellent pastries and jams made by the resident Clarisse nuns — worth buying if you are passing.
The adjacent garden terrace has good views over the lower town toward the coast. The church is on Via Cavour, a short walk from the cathedral.
A story
Gagliardi designed Santa Chiara with an oval interior — an unusual form for Sicily at the time, borrowed from Roman Baroque churches he had studied in books. The nuns of the Clarisse convent who commissioned the church were enclosed — they heard mass through grilles in the walls, invisible to the congregation. The church was designed partly to make this separation physically apparent and partly to create a theatrical experience for the worshippers who could see the high altar but not the sisters who prayed beside it.