Palazzo dell'Arco

The House of the Captain

The palace is attested in the late fifteenth century statutes as the house of the Captain. It was built in 1473 by the Spaniard Francesco de Arenis, executioner of Terra di Bari and Terra d'Otranto, as reported in a lost inscription handed down to us by nineteenth-century scholarship.

It is known from the statutes approved in 1521 by the viceroy Raimondo de Cardona, that the documentation relating to the Universitas was kept in a wardrobe in the Captain's Palace. It is likely that these papers were then moved, together with those kept at the Santo Sepolcro, to the sixteenth-century headquarters of the city archive.

Organized on two levels, the building has a loggia on the ground floor set on large pointed arches.

In the sixteenth century it became a monastery and hosted the Benedictine nuns of the Annunziata, while the headquarters of the Universitas moved to Palazzo Pretorio.