The "Roberto Caracciolo" Franciscan Art Gallery is located. in Lecce. The merit of its foundation goes to the Provincial Minister Br. Egidio De Tommaso, who at the beginning of the 60s, had the idea of preserving and protecting various paintings from the various Franciscan monasteries in the Salento area, which if they had not been saved would have been destroyed or fallen into oblivion. So already starting from 1964 the rooms of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Della Monica, formerly the seat of the Provincial Curia of the Friars Minor of Lecce, hosted the first nucleus of the collection which, over the years, has grown more and more thanks to donations and further acquisitions, becoming more and more a point of reference for the art and culture of Southern Puglia. To date, the Pinacoteca Caracciolo is the largest art gallery in Salento and is the only one in Europe to be specialized in the conservation of Baroque and Counter-Reformation works of a distinctly Franciscan matrix.