THE ORIGINS OF THE CHURCH

The church sanctuary of St. Mary of the Nova with reasonable grounds to be the oldest existing church dedicated to the Virgin in Ostuni. Santa Maria Nova is a sixteenth century church, located within a blade, in a place once called "Li Furci," that place of refuge for wildlife, architectural lines in a Gothic facade showing a pointed portal topped with a rose and crown with a theory consisting of trefoil arches on which stands a small tower. In fact it was built around 1560 and is the latest example of Gothic structure in Ostuni modeled on stylistic references offered by the cathedral. The church building was probably made by the noble family of Zachary, one of the most illustrious and ancient seat of the noble families registered at St. Blaise said. No written document certifying the origin of what was once the early church in the existing rock cavities located behind the existing architectural building from the early decades of the sixteenth century. The geologist Cosimo de Giorgi in his monograph The Province of Lecce, the date printed in 1882, provides for the first time a detailed report on the material of this ancient church dedicated to the Mother of God: After a km from Ostuni, we stop for a moment in front of a rustic church, called Our Lady of the Nova, which is left of the bridge of the same name and at a lower level of the street. In the front we will see a door surmounted by a lunette, closed with a pointed arch slightly compressed, and a circular window in tunnels carved with flower patterns, plus a fregiodelicato under the arched frame. It was built in the sixteenth century (1561); However, what it shows is certainly changed the inside of the small church with a vaulted roof resting directly on the outer walls. Lines and baroque decorations that once existed in the church, we see only this kind of stone altar bill eighteenth century, commissioned in 1761 by Antonio Taberini chaplain. It 'still believe that everything from the interior of the venerable church was revisited during the eighteenth and styles covered more in tune with the tastes of the time. But the new and the baroque interior have totally replaced the old. The ranks of the church of St. Giorgi Maria Nova of street on the left (the road 16 now), leaving behind the village and along the main road towards Ostuni-Carovigno, just as we observe in our times. The layout of the facade topped by a slender bell tower with two tubes, has not undergone any change along its five hundred years of history.