The Convent of the Carmelites of Lecce, currently home to the Rectorate of the University of Salento, together with the adjacent Church of S. Maria del Carmine represents one of the most significant testimonies to the countless historical events that have affected the urban social structure of the city of Lecce.
The Convent is built between the 1500s and 1600s by Paduano Bax, on earlier stratifications. In particular, the cloister, in the second half of the 17th century, was enriched with frescoes depicting stories of the order’s saints, which restoration in the early 2000s has made fragmentarily re-emerge, as well as revealing, thanks to an intensive excavation campaign, a sequence of thirteen phases of occupation ranging from the Paleolithic to the late 1500s, passing through the Messapi, the late Roman age and the Middle Ages.
