The church stands in the square of the same name, at the foot of Sant’Elia hill, in the village that, as documented by Giovanni Spano (1861), was home during the 19th century to the Bagno Penale, the first penitential colony on the island. The convicts were mainly used for salt mining. Two churches arose in the 17th century: one dedicated to the Virgin of Lluc (1679) has now disappeared and only the toponym remains in its memory; the other was dedicated to St. Bartholomew, a saint venerated in Barcelona, whose devotion was precisely encouraged by the Spaniards. The building, erected in the mid-1700s, had a single nave with a wooden roof resting on pointed diaphragm arches.
In the 18th century, a portal in Piedmontese Baroque style was added to the late Gothic facade, reusing the original drainage arch. In 1678, with the bequest of the Trapani noblewoman Rosalia Genovès, a chapel was opened on the left flank, with an octagonal plan surmounted by a dome, in whose marble balustrade the family coats of arms were inscribed. The gilded wooden altarpiece (late 17th-early 18th century), which occupies the back of the chapel, is the work of a local carver and houses the wooden simulacrum of the Madonna of Trapani, a 17th-century copy of the 14th-century marble model preserved in the Sicilian shrine. Of the grand altarpiece of the high altar remains the altarpiece depicting the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew (Giovanni Mazzini, Roman, 1650), the summit panel with the Eternal Father, and the two half-panels (Preaching of St. John the Baptist and Miracle of the Canaanite Woman).
From the dismemberment of the retable in 1950, only two twisted columns and two angel-acroters remain. The altar frontal of the high altar in inlaid polychrome marble, executed in 1767 by the Spazi workshop, commissioned by the Gremio dei Beccai (butchers), placed under the protection of St. Bartholomew, is valuable.
