The former Convent of the Observant Minor Friars of Santa Maria della Pietà

The convent of S. Maria della Pietà of the Observant Minor Friars, within which the New Archaeological Museum is located, represents one of the main historical buildings present in the heart of the city of Ugento, adapted over time to different uses .
On the basis of a recent rereading of historical sources, the original layout of the convent must be traced back to the years around 1480, when the count of Ugento, Aghelberto del Balzo, husband of Maria Conquesta, daughter of Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo, built create a place of retreat and prayer for the Franciscan order of the Observant Friars Minor. The building, named together with the attached church of S. Maria della Pietà, was built taking into account the need to host a rather large religious community. Around the first decades of the eighteenth century, with the increase in the number of friars present, it became increasingly prestigious, so much so that it was also used as a place to study various disciplines, including those of theology and philosophy. It is in the context of this flowering that after the mid-eighteenth century, work began on the renovation of the original Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, which at this time was dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua. The changes made to the building consisted in the replacement of the roof with a new vaulted roof, and in the creation, along the northern wall of the church, of a staircase leading to the upper floor of the convent; this renovation also involved the erection of a wall which completely closed, within a cavity, the back walls of the frescoed chapels located along the side of the church adjacent to the convent (see "The walled chapels" below).
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the monastic complex alternated periods in which it continued to be the seat of the novitiate and others in which it became the residence of the provincial minister (from 1810 to 1830) and then the seat of provincial study for dogmatic and moral theology. Following the Royal Decree of 7 July 1866, with the suppression of the religious orders and corporations, the real estate of the suppressed convents was donated to the State. The former convent was therefore initially used as a Royal Carabinieri Barracks, while its rooms were later transformed into school classrooms and Town Hall offices; the Church of S. Antonio was instead donated to the Congregazione dell'Addolorata, which reopened it for worship in 1891. The interior of the Church as it is seen today is the result of a restoration completed in 2000. In 1968, the Municipality used the premises of the former convent housing the "Civic Museum of Archeology and Paleontology", which later became the "New Archaeological Museum" in 2009.
The convent, which has undergone rather minimal transformations over time, has essentially preserved the original architectural layout, characterized by a fairly simple and essential model, with various rooms arranged on two floors around a central cloister. On the ground floor there were the refectory, the kitchens and other small service rooms that opened onto the cloister's quadriportico, while on the first floor the 23 small retreat cells for the friars and the library room overlooked large corridors. Since 2005 the building has undergone important restoration works aimed at adapting the rooms to the new museum structure. During these activities, interesting more or less intact frescoes and also traces of preparatory drawings re-emerged, the discovery of which allowed us to have an idea of ​​the original pictorial decoration of the building which was almost completely unknown until then. In the three lunettes located along the western wall of the quadriportico, frescoes have resurfaced which depict episodes from the life of Saint Anthony of Padua and which were in fact created in the second half of the eighteenth century, following the restructuring operations of the Church of S. Maria della Pietà, which at the time was named after the Saint. In the first lunette the visit to the tyrant Ezzelino da Romano is represented, below which is the inscription "Saverio Pisanello-per devozione di lui-1775" (fig. 1); in the second lunette, however, the miracle of the mule kneeling in front of the consecrated host appears (fig. 2), while in the fresco of the third lunette, less intact than the others, another scene from the life of the Saint was probably depicted.
Also on the ground floor, the walls of the large refectory room which opens onto the eastern side of the quadriportico are decorated for a total height of approximately two meters with a monochromatic pictorial cycle, characterized by a black color on gray plaster (and only a few colored detail), probably dating back to the last decades of the sixteenth century (figs. 3-4). The upper part portrays scenes from Genesis such as the Separation of darkness, the Creation of Adam and Eve, the Original Sin, the Expulsion from Paradise, Adam at work, the Construction of the ark, the Universal Flood and the Sacrifice of Noah; the lower part is instead characterized by a continuous decoration of racemes, spirals and allegorical figures. On the south-eastern wall there is a majestic eighteenth-century fresco which almost completely obliterates the sixteenth-century decoration and which depicts the Last Supper (fig. 5), with, in the upper part, an oval portraying the Immaculate Conception.
On the first floor, the frescoes that decorate the library room, located in the south-western corner (room 15) date back to the beginning of the 18th century. On the ceiling of this room, the large coat of arms of Bishop Lazaro y Terrez dominates, supported by small cherubs, subjects that are found on the sides of the lunettes (fig. 6), inside which the depictions of the Immaculate Conception stand out and of the saints of the Franciscan order (among which we recognize St. Bonaventure, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Bernardino of Siena, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. John of Capestrano, St. . Louis of Toulouse, St. Clare and St. Elizabeth of Hungary). The iconographic rendering of the pictorial cycle that emerged from the long restoration intervention confirms the use of the Franciscan canons among the local workers, capable of an evocative popular and devotional re-elaboration.
In one of the cells on the upper floor that overlook the eastern side of the cloister (room 11), the bringing to light of the primitive plaster that covered the masonry structures of the side walls also revealed the presence of some drawings, partly only sketched and in partly more complete and partially colored (fig. 7). They depict various scenes with male and female figures represented both without clothes and in typically sixteenth-century clothing with natural landscapes in the background in which some buildings can be distinguished, including a castle and a palace. The set of depictions probably refers to the events characterizing epic-chivalric poems and it is possible that their authorship can be attributed to a permanent guest of the convent, who perhaps knew this type of literary works, rather than to the initiative of a friar. On the back wall of the cell, however, stands out, in the form of a sinopia, the "source of life" with circular basins (fig. 8) and above it the scene of original sin with the representation of the tree, the serpent and Adam and Eve (fig. 9).

I. Miccoli