Statutes-Bolle - (Puglia)

Brotherhood of the Immaculate of the Nobles

After the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563, the great renewal of the ecclesiastical structures and of the religious life of the devout laity was also set in motion in the Viceroyalty of Naples.

There are few sources of which we know and do not always agree on the year of institution and on the first events of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, later known as the Nobles. This is true both for the papers of the confraternity archive, scarce and inadequate due to a continuous and guilty dissipation that has lasted to the present day, as well as for the memories handed down by chroniclers and local scholars.

Despite the loss, which occurred around the middle of the twentieth century, of the eighteenth-century audience of the association, which is certainly the most authoritative document for obtaining direct information, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct briefly the main events of the period of its origins. Their knowledge came after a laborious archival research and a demanding reflection on the acquired data.

The Confraternity governed itself with the rules of the Oratory of the Concezione The starting point is undoubtedly 3 June 1619: a parchment preserved in the Oratory of the Nobles, testifies to the aggregation of the young “martinese congregation” to the Archconfraternity of the SS. Concezione de Urbe in the Church of S. Damaso in Rome.