Simple and mighty in its forms, the Church of Santa Maria la Nova was built in 1500 by apostolic brief of Alexander VI, under the patronage of Francesco II Orsini duke of Gravina and count of Terlizzi. The church, located a little less than two hundred meters from the Borgo on land bordering the wide street that has since been called the Via degli Osservanti, came into being at the same time as a conspicuous convent complex equipped with fraternal cells, guest quarters, classrooms, library, parlor, various storerooms, kitchen, refectory, cloister, vegetable garden, garden, and cisterns. Ne 1619 the building was renovated at the convent’s expense “with the help of the Virgin,” as the Latin inscription reads, engraved along the terminal cymatium frieze of the church’s southern flank. Then especially over the eighteenth century the same nobility built their own pantheon in S. Maria La Nova, still called by all “the Church of the Convent,” disappeared instead, the latter since the nineteenth century in the great unfinished bulk of the seminary. Its enduring majesty shines through its stairways that well encircle the perimeter.
