After 1960, the Palace was owned by priest Sebastiano Verona. It encompassed a block of houses which belonged to the Pernetta family. The property then belonged to canon Francesco Saverio Pasca and to his brother Michele, who, since 1844 have run an oratory where the Mass could be celebrated.
The Pasca family, now extinct, was related to the Rossi of Positano, the Ravenna, and the Vinci of Parabita. In the Pasca family, the noble Raymondo family became extinct.
The Palace displays a large gallery mounted on strong corbels and a sober late Baroque pattern of the doorway and of the fenestration due to a restoration intervention made in the first thirsty years of the nineteenth century.
Church and Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception
The church, whose entrance is from the cloister of the Reformed Franciscans, was erected in 1768. The Confraternity has existed since 1600 and set in the Immaculate altar of the church of St. Francis of Assisi. The brethrens moved then to a new oratory built, on the initiative of the nobleman Francesco Coppola, on the north side of the Franciscan cloister in 1720.
The building of the new church coincided with the reformulation of the rules of the order made by friar Bonaventura da Lama. In 1864, the Confraternity could prevent their property from becoming a State property thanks to the demolition of the boundary wall of the Franciscan monastery and the building of the new front off-road.
The single nave interior of the church preserves valuable paintings representing events of Tobia’s life made by Oronzo Tiso and Liborio Riccio in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ten painted lunettes of Judith’s life and of other themes from the Bible above the cornice and a picture of the Immaculate with St. Francis and St. Joseph above the altar can be seen.
The choir is in cornu Epistolae (where the Gospel was read), but the organ pipe, made by the Neapolitan Carlo Mancini in 1759 or 1760, is now preserved in the sacristy. Also the beautiful papier māche statue of the Immaculate and the wooden statue of St. Felix are in the sacristy.
On Good Friday, the Confraternity shows evocative scenes of the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ made by Fiorentino Nocera.
Original text – Elio Pindinelli
English translation by Rocco Merenda
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