Church of Santa Barbara

Beneath the vault of the Arch of Santa Barbara lies the Baroque church of the same name, rebuilt in 1694 by Cardinal Carlo Barberini, commendatory abbot, on the foundations of the old seat. It was a small place of worship created in a 15th-century private house by the owner himself, mindful of the danger he had escaped in the siege by the Malatesta artillery of 1461, a siege described in a passage by the historian Pietro Gritio from Jesi in a marble epigraph posted on the left of the entrance, outside the church). Inside there are also precious 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 Santa Barbara, in the chapel on the right created in the ancient keep. It was already venerated as miraculous and moved here at the beginning of the 19th century together with the epigraph, after being cut from the wall of an original rural shrine and then preserved for over a century in the peripheral church of San Rocco. The jewels of the church, however, are the French prints of the Via Crucis, the “Sant’Antonio Abate” (painting by an unknown artist, with the schematized representation of the town of Barbara, where on the left you can recognize the old Romanesque church of the Assumption), the “Santa Barbara” exhibited on the high altar by Sebastiano Conca, an esteemed representative of the Roman school of painting of the early eighteenth century, and the “Madonna with the Archangel Michael, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Saint Joseph and Saint Charles Borromeo”, a mature work by the Venetian Claudio Ridolfi and to which the artist has given a plastic and realistic characterization. On the side opposite the church entrance, on the front of the old town hall, the sixteenth-century stone panel of local measurements, the oldest among the similar ones in the Senigallia area, is still affixed.