The Church of Santa Maria Misericordia - Bettona
The origins of this church date back to the dawn of Christianity. According to tradition it stands on the house of the first miracle of San Crispolto. At the beginning of the thirteenth century it was enlarged and then rededicated, on October 19, 1225, in the presence of the bishops of Assisi, Guido II, of Perugia, and Foligno. In 1797, thanks to funds procured from the sale of properties of the four brotherhoods and of three rural churches, a collegiate church was built adjacent to the original structure. A restoration carried out by the architect Giovanni Cerrini, which lasted from 1803 to 1816, gave the church its current neoclassical appearance. The interior has a single nave in a Greek cross fashion and seven altars.
In the first altar on the left you can admire an oil on canvas depicting the Mystical Wedding of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the work of an Umbrian painter between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.
In the second altar, placed in correspondence with the left arm of the church where a door opens onto the square, you can admire a magnificent fourteenth-century Crucifix. After a canvas depicting San Sebastiano there is the third altar on the left wall, whose altarpiece depicts the Madonna and Child seated on a cloud among the angels, at her feet San Crispolto praying.
The high altar is adorned with a finely crafted ciborium by Cruciano Egiduzio from Bettona. The apse was frescoed in 1939 by the futurist painter Gerardo Dottori.