Church of the Santissima Annunziata dei Catalani, Medieval church in central Messina, Italy.

The Church of the Santissima Annunziata dei Catalani is a 12th-century Norman church in central Messina, built on the ruins of a temple to Neptune. Its exterior shows a three-apse plan with alternating dark and light stone, and the central apse is unusually well preserved. The church now sits about 3 metres below the rebuilt street level after the 1908 earthquake.

The church was built around 1150 on the site of an ancient temple dedicated to Neptune, placing a medieval Christian building directly over a Roman religious site. It was later taken over by the Catalan merchant community, who gave it its current name.

In the late 15th century, with Sicily under the Spanish Crown, Iberian merchants outside the old Crown of Aragon were admitted too, and the church became the seat of the confraternity of Catalan merchants, who gave it its present name. They commissioned an altar of Nostra Signora della Soledad and a burial crypt for the confreres. The main altar painting showed the Annunciate Virgin with the Angel and Sant'Eulalia, patron of Barcelona and Catalonia.

The church sits roughly 10 feet (3 meters) below the current street level, so visitors descend to enter the building. The entrance is on Via Garibaldi and easy to find when walking through the center of Messina.

This church is one of the very few buildings in Messina that survived the 1908 earthquake without losing its original structure. Standing inside, you are looking at construction techniques from the 12th century that were never altered by later rebuilding.