Old monasteries and new cemeteries. The case of the Capuchins in Conversano, Italy

In the first decades of the 19th century, the local authorities of Capitanata, Terra di Bari and Terra d'Otranto devoted themselves to the acquisition of extramural land and the planning of new cemeteries in application of the sanitary laws enacted in 1817 during the Bourbon Restoration, in compliance with the provisions of the Napoleonic edict of Saint-Cloud. The idea of acquiring places of worship outside the city walls, including suppressed monasteries, with their walled gardens to be included in the enclosures of the cemeteries to be erected, immediately appeared to be a useful expedient to overcome the difficulty of conceiving a new spatial model for burials, taking advantage of architectural structures that offered the dual advantage of relying on considerable cost containment and maintaining a strong link with the ancient Christian tradition of burial in a sacred place. This entailed redesigning the relationship between built and enclosed spaces of many Capuchin structures, which were deprived of their walled garden with the inevitable transformation of the site and, consequently, forced to redefine their semantics. In the case of Conversano, the different spatial relationships pose a problem to be reflected upon in order to assess the appropriateness of a conservation and enhancement project for the Capuchin structure, whose destiny cannot fail to take into account the physical relationship between the convent and the cemetery, between what survives of the walled garden and what has become part of the garden of the memory.