Early evening: the perfect time for a stroll through Palermo’s centro storico. Eighteenth-century palazzi lined the streets, their windows framed by the ruffs and frills of Baroque stonework. Some were in a state of utter dilapidation, others alive with the sound of laborers bringing their stately façades back to life. From the dust-covered sidewalks, churches reared up in a profusion of carved decoration.

My partner, Matthew, and I stepped inside the Oratorio del Rosario di Santa Cita and were greeted by a riot of Rococo stuccowork created by Giacomo Serpotta — a Palermitani artist who turned this interior into a theater of religious storytelling, rendering statues of the virtues and scenes from the Passion in plaster as crisp and white as royal icing.