This church appears to have been built between 1598 and 1600 next to the cloistered Monastery of the Nuns of St. Clare, founded in Gallipoli in 1578.
Only the ancient church survives today, in 1904 devolved to the Confraternity of St. Joseph organized here.
Its interior preserves a valuable collection, unique in number and size of works, of paintings by Giovan Domenico Catalano from Gallipoli, who worked in Salento at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries.
By this author are the large altarpiece with Saints Peter and Paul, St. Francis and St. Clare dated 1599, and the canvases of the Crucifixion, St. Catherine of Alexandria and the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary placed on the altars of the church hall.
The chancel placed against the high altar and built in 1905, preserves an almost intact organ built in 1779 by Neapolitan Carlo Mancini.
D’Acugna Palace
In was the dwelling of the Spanish captain Francisco D’Acugna who dedicated to the Soanish king Philip IV a long inscription which can still be read on the front of the Palace. It was later owned by the Granafei family.
Pietro D’Acugna of the Marquises of St.Helen’s wife, who got married here in the sixteenth century, belonged to the Gallipoli Demetrio family who built the Palace.
It is a typically sixteenth century fortified building with a Durazzo doorway and looks like Balsamo Palace, whereas the fenestration of the Renaissance recalls the one of Pirelli Palace.
Noteworthy int he entrance hall is a drop-shaped arch mounted on plinths with a refined ribbed braided moulding. The balconies, that have been built after, have altered the austere fenestration of the front and have partially cut the long Spanish inscription. It overlooks the 19th-century building of the Municipal Museum.
Old underground oil mills underneath the Palace that can be visited.
Underground oil mills
They represent a rare opportunity to know: the old particular process of oil production; the unique internal structure and the original processing tools such as wooden oil presses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Two are the underground oil mills retrieved and restored by Gallipoli Nostra Association, that operates in the context of safeguarding, recovery and divulgation of the local historical, cultural and artistic heritage of the town.
The former under Granafei Palace is in A. De Pace streent in front of the Museum and the latter is in Angeli street under Palazzo Briganti.
Completely excavated in the subsoil, they preserve, in addition to the original structure, important relics related to ancient oil production, of which Gallipoli once held the record for export to the Baltic countries, Russia, England, the Netherlands and the Ottoman Empire.
Also singular is the history relating to the commercial practice of the product through orders in derricks and the presence, until 1923, of all the vice consulates of foreign nations in Gallipoli.
Original text – Elio Pindinelli
English translation by Rocco Merenda
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