Tolve's town hall occupies a Franciscan convent. The conventuals of St Francis began building it in 1583, uphill and detached from the village, for twelve friars; Napoleonic law closed it in 1809, and since then the building has changed tenants more than once: for a long stretch it housed the Archconfraternity of the Glorious San Rocco, today it holds the municipal offices. The four-sided cloister, with its well in the middle and its arches carried on columns, has stayed where it was.
What to see
The convent was first of all a farm. Two large rooms served for processing milk, the kitchen was topped by a great chimney and an oven, and then came the dormitory, the refectory and the pantry; underneath ran a cistern fed by a spring rising uphill, the same water that filled the well in the middle of the cloister. The inventory says the rest: 80 upper and lower houses, 200 hectares of land, 75 cattle, 1300 sheep, two mules and a mare, a donkey mill for grinding grain, an olive press in the farmstead, an apothecary's room.
The church has a single nave and six frescoed niches holding paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries, stolen in 1996 and recovered in 1998. Two canvases are by Pietro Antonio Ferro of Tricarico: an Immaculate Virgin with Child and Bishop Saints and, at the third altar on the right, the Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Eligius, painted in 1621 and restored in 2017. Behind the altar, the flat apse holds three panels from a dismembered altarpiece attributed to Ferro himself, an Annunciation, a St Francis and a St Anthony of Padua, with a Martyrdom of St Stephen below. In the choir stands a pipe organ, and the balustrade of its gallery carries nine 18th-century canvases attributed to the Neapolitan Lorenzo De Caro.
Visiting
The earthquake of 1980 badly damaged both church and convent; restoration was finished in the nineties. In 2017 the church was closed to worship again for further works, so check before you set out whether it has reopened. The cloister, on the other hand, is part of the building that houses the town hall: plan around office hours.
Our editors' tip
Look up at the singing gallery before you look at the altars: the nine 18th-century canvases on its balustrade, Franciscan women saints and women martyrs, are the easiest thing to miss in this church, because they can only be seen from below.