page_title: Pia Opera Pastore
section_title: Historical hints
hierarchical_section_title: Pia Opera Pastore / Historical hints
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Pia Opera Pastore ad Alcamo
context_page_description: The Pia Opera Pastore was a private charitable institution, mainly in support of poor and sick people, which had its seat in the palace of the baron Felice Pastore near Porta Trapani, in Alcamo.
context_section_description: The building was constructed between 1870 and 1874, following the testamentary dispositions of the baron Felice Pastore Cambon, and assigned to the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. His wife, that is Donna Stefania Naselli di Montaperto of the dukes of Gela and sister of Giovan Battista Naselli, the archbishop of Palermo (1853-1870), was decisive in fetching the Nuns of Charity to Alcamo. In fact, even if she could stop the foundation of this institution, as she survived her husband, she did not do it, on the contrary she helped it.
  Its main purposes were the following: 
  Housing girls to educate and instruct them, in order to be useful to themselves and to society.
  Daily hosting external girls in apposite rooms, in order to receive the religious education and instruction appropriate for their class, preferring the poorer ones.
  Daily curing of the sick people, external to the institution, in some separate rooms, and doing home-based health care: these activities had to be done by the Daughters of Charity.
  The foundation had also to keep a dispensary and a pharmacy for the people in need that the Nuns had to care.
  Initially, from 1870 to 1874, it operated at Palazzo Pastore in corso 6 Aprile, then it moved to the seat in via Pia Opera Pastore. The first Mother superior was Suor Luisa Castets, a French woman from Besançon and in the first years of its actitivity classes were given in French.
  In 1913, owing to financial problems, they modified the statute and closed the pharmacy; between 1914 and 1916 it was the seat of a private Teachers' training school (Istituto Magistrale). Thanks to a financing by the Ministry of the Interior, there was an antitubercular preventive sanatorium for children who were lodged at the prophylactic Dispensary, if they were sick, and went back home when they had recovered their health.
  In 1945 they set up an infirmary, a new hall for sick people; in 1954 they opened a nursery school, which was closed in 1958. Owing to the 1968 Belice earthquake, the premises were unfit for use, but the nuns went on assisting the earthquake victims from Alcamo and the neighbouring towns.
  The building is internally divided into three wings, with the chapel in the central one on the ground floor, which you can enter through a lobby; there were the waiting room, the secretary's office, service rooms and a large corridor here. The right wing was occupied by the nursery school and the left one by the elementary school, that was free for poor families and fee-paying for the rich ones.
  In the rooms adjoining the chapel there were the kitchen and the refectory; on the first floor there were once the dormitory and the laboratory of cutting and embroidery. In 1956 they built a new wing for the Preventorium, closed in the sixties thanks to the improvement of the hygienic and sanitarian conditions in Alcamo. Later, in 2000 the nuns were moved.
  At present the premises belong to IPAB (Public Institutions of Assistance and Charity: Opere Pie Pastore and San Pietro): some of them are rent for vocational training courses, others are used as a hospitality centre for non-EU immigrants.
caption: The palace of Pia Opera Pastore today
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