Chiesa delle Anime

In Piazza delle Anime stands a church with two names. It was dedicated to Saint Sebastian, but everyone in Brindisi calls it the Church of the Souls, because this is where people come to pray for their dead. It was commissioned by the Archconfraternity of the Souls in Purgatory and opened for worship on 13 August 1671 by Archbishop Francesco de Estrada.

The gabled façade is late Baroque, topped by a broken pediment. Above the portal, dated 1670, you'll notice an eighteenth-century lyre-shaped window and the city's coat of arms.

Inside, in the single nave, are a wooden Our Lady of Sorrows of the Venetian school, several late-sixteenth-century paintings, a "Saint Januarius protecting from the earthquake" by Giovanni Scatigno (1747) and an "Adoration of the Shepherds" attributed to Carlo Rosa. Umberto Colonna's martyrdom of Saint Sebastian dates from 1950.