Briganti Palace

This is a sober but significant example of Gallipoli building architecture. The Palace was refurbished and embellished in the second half of 1700 at the care of the Briganti family, who being from Racale, has lived here since the seventeenth century.

The rusticated doorway and the stucco moldings of the windows show how local nobility wanted to highlight their cultural and social roles in town.

The south wing of the Palace belongs to the original construction, whereas, the north one was rebuilt in 1925 and up to until a few decades ago it was used as Carabinieri barracks.

In this palace was born, in 1691, Tommaso Briganti, a jurist of great depth, but also a Catholic philosopher and a supporter of the anticurialist doctrines, very close to the thought of the Catholic reformers, and therefore firm in his claim to civil rights and opposed to the claims of the curialists and to the immunity theories in favor of the ecclesiastics.

Filippo, Tommaso’s son, born in 1724, was a sustainer of the fundamental rights of the individual integrated into social solidarity.

He also supported Filangeri’s thoughts and reflections and was, as hi father, in favour of the abolition of torture.

He opposed Beccaria about the introduction of “eternal punishment” but he praised his wish for the reduction of “oppressive needlessness of penalties”.

The Briganti family, as well as assuming a prominent place in the cultural debate in the Neapolitan Enlightenment matrix, remains a fundamental point of reference in the vindication of the value of freedom, the power of reason, the cult of duty.

The last successor, among the many of this family, was Tommaso Briganti junior, of Domenico, (born 1837), a romantic poet, who along an existential and cultural family path pointed the way to Risorgimento nationalism at the height of the Risorgimento, the phase of Enlightenment universalism having ended.

Original text – Elio Pindinelli
English translation by Rocco Merenda