The building, dating from 1911 and owned by the Royal Orphanage of the Daughters of Mary, is a late 19th-century style structure. The upper floor has been restored retaining the original fixtures as well as the floors of the wide, long corridor. The apsidal chapel with large women’s gallery preserves antique pews, stained glass windows from the Art Nouveau period, commissioned in Turin, and three majestic statues. The structure still contains the ancient marble and grit wash-houses, the loggia where people went to hang their laundry, a garden, and at the back, behind a gate and stairway that descends below ground level, a river of water flowing into the bowels of the city: the dragonara of Falacodda, from which flowed the spring that fed the fountain of the Brigliadore of Santa Maria in Bethlem. Inside there are numerous portraits, painted or sculpted, of the benefactors of the Institution.
