Taverna

Taverna sits at around 530 meters, the built-up core arranged around the convent complex and climbing the slope beneath the forests. The mountain rises directly behind the town: beech and pine cover the plateau, and the frazione of Villaggio Mancuso sits nearly 1,400 meters above the centro, reached from below and used for summer escape and winter snow, a second, higher Taverna in effect, linked to the town below by altitude alone.

The painter born here in 1613 worked in Rome, Naples and finally Malta, where he died in 1699 after decorating the conventual church of the Order of St. John in Valletta. He returned to Taverna repeatedly and sent paintings home rather than settling here again, which is why his work fills a convent church in a small mountain town rather than a capital. The former Dominican convent attached to that church now holds the civic museum, so the town's two collections of his work sit inside the same walls. What Taverna adds up to is a hill settlement whose historic core was shaped by one absent painter's continued attention, standing at the foot of a plateau that the town depends on for its higher, cooler counterpart.