Chiesa di Santa Maria del Gesù, International Gothic church in Modica, Italy.

The church of Santa Maria del Gesù, built 1478–1481, has a 16th-century facade with a deeply recessed pointed portal whose capitals show the crossed arms of Christ and St Francis; the cusps are kept in the Museo Civico. Above the portal are two mullioned windows and a rose window, with the bell tower on the left. The adjoining convent has a two-order late Gothic cloister, square in plan, with eight-light porticoes, cross vaults below and loggias above.

The Observant Franciscans built this structure between 1478 and 1481 with backing from Countess Giovanna Ximenes de Cabrera, who donated it to commemorate her daughter's wedding. This construction marked a turning point for religious architecture in the region during the early modern period.

The convent hosted studies in philosophy, theology and sacred writing until the late 1600s and received figures such as Placido Carrafa. The church also holds the Riva chapel, founded by the Milanese nobleman Cristoforo Riva and dedicated to Saint Anne, with an altarpiece by Bernardino Nigro showing Saint Anne, the Virgin, the infant Jesus and the young John the Baptist, flanked by Saints Ambrose and Augustine.

This place reopened to visitors in 2011 after major restoration work, allowing access to both the main building and the adjoining cloister. Set aside time to explore both areas, as the complex includes several interconnected spaces worth seeing.

The two-storey cloister is described in the sources as a unicum in all of southern Italy, with surviving stylistic parallels found in Catalonia. Its square plan has porticoes of eight bays each, cross vaults with ribs on the lower level and loggias above, a tiled floor and a central well framed by a stone arch.