Chivalric Ideals and Popular Piety in an Early Modern Metropolis: The Confraternita dei Pellegrini and its Hospital

As the Council of Trento began to be implemented, a noble knight of Malta - Fabrizio Pignatelli - laid the foundation of a little church in Naples inspired by the medieval ethos of Saint John's order: hosting pilgrims (1574). Death hit before he finished the project, but the foundation developed into the 'SS. Trinità dei Pellegrini e Convalescenti'; even in 1600s, one of Naples most prestigious confraternities and hospitals; a reality that mutatis mutandi still exists. Guilds, merchants, brotherhoods and other institutions, royal and ecclesiastical ranks shaped the hospital's development and activities, adapting its structure and its rules to social needs, meanwhile the care for pilgrims as categories of charity was changing. But the noble aristocracy's presence remained a stable treat linked to the founding legacy and to the social prestige gained by the hospital. This sort of 'double soul', noble and 'bourgeois' added complexity to the hospital's history. In this way the Arch-confraternity of The Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims of Naples became a sort of a kaleidoscope and a flywheel of religious, socio-economic and cultural phenomena that crossed this Mediterranean capital.