Behind the Grilles, Life

Nuns, Plague and Poverty in the Heart of Seventeenth-Century Apulia

Behind the grilles of the Monastery of Santa Chiara in Turi, life does not disappear: it contracts, wears thin, yet endures. In seventeenth-century Apulia, marked by famine, epidemics and economic instability, the enclosure of the Poor Clares becomes a clear boundary between the world and daily survival. The sources describe a harsh age, crossed by recurrent mortality, contagion and failed harvests, which drastically reduced the population and impoverished the monastery’s revenues.

The Pastoral Visitation of 1659, carried out on behalf of the Bishop of Conversano, offers an unembellished and severe picture: meagre income, unclear accounts, revenues lost or no longer recoverable, and debts accumulated over time. The monastery is burdened with obligations far beyond its means, while the nuns struggle to sustain a life already defined by extreme renunciation.

The words of the abbesses, preserved in the documents, are direct and devoid of rhetoric. Food, once distributed more regularly, is drastically reduced: bread falls from several weekly portions to a few measured rations; wine disappears altogether; hunger becomes a daily companion. “Where once it was sufficient morning and evening,” one testimony records, “today the morning portion alone would suffice for a bird.”

Penance is no longer a chosen ascetic path, but a condition imposed by circumstance.

Life within the monastery continues under strict observance of the Rule. Nights pass in darkness to save oil; silence governs choir, dormitory and refectory alike. Offices of governance—Abbess, Vicaress, Cellarer, Infirmarian, Portress—rotate according to established cycles, yet the burden of administration rests on bodies weakened by illness and malnutrition. Contact with the outside world is minimal: monitored correspondence, rare gifts of food or cloth, and no stable system of external support.

In 1659, the monastery counts 39 religious women, including professed nuns, lay sisters and boarders. Entry into enclosure requires substantial dowries—between 300 and 350 ducats—sums many families are unable to provide. Some women enter without dowry; others see family property mortgaged; still others remain suspended in a state of uncertainty that mirrors the condition of Turi itself, described in contemporary sources as “lamentable and extremely poor.”

And yet, behind those grilles, life continues. Despite hunger, debt, fear of death and the weight of enclosure, the nuns endure. They pray, administer, and preserve. The monastery thus becomes a place of silent resistance, where deprivation is transformed into permanence and silence into historical testimony.

Credits

Text and historical research: Giovanni Lerede

Original publication: il paese, no. 311, April 2023 – Historical supplement

Photography: Giovanni Palmisano

Sources

• Don Pasquale Pirulli, The Foundation and Assets of the Monastery of Santa Chiara in Turi, in “Sulletracce”, nos. 5/2002 – 6/2003 – 7/2004.

• Don Pasquale Pirulli, Outcomes of the First Pastoral Visitation of Bishop Pietro Capuilli of Conversano (1606), in “Sulletracce”, no. 8/2005.

• Don Pasquale Pirulli, The 1659 Visitation of Bishop Palermo to the Church of Turi, in “Sulletracce”, no. 12/2011.

• Don Pasquale Pirulli, The Nuns of Santa Chiara: Illness and Remedies Beyond the Enclosure Grille, in “Sulletracce”, no. 13/2014.

• Matteo Pugliese, Domestic Patrimonialism and Early Forms of Solidarity in Lay Benefices and Patronage in Turi (16th–19th centuries), in “Sulletracce”, no. 1/1988.

• Cesare Romanazzi, The Will of Santo Cavallo, in “Sulletracce”, no. 8/2005.

• Giovanni Boraccesi, The Church of Santa Chiara in Turi, in “Fogli di periferia”, Year VI, no. 1, 1994.