Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista di Monteleone di Puglia

The sacred building is a small masterpiece of neoclassical architecture, enriched with rococo decorations. Built at the beginning of '800 in Piazza Regina Margherita, the building stands on the ruins of a previous fourteenth-century church.

The most valuable element of the church consists of the facade: made of grey ashlar stone, diamond tip is decorated with pilasters and is distinguished in two levels. The first level is characterized by the presence of a beautiful stone portal embellished with floral friezes and pinnacles, on which stands a niche that houses the minute statue of the saint. The second level has more curvilinear elements and a clock in the central position. Very beautiful is also the mighty bell tower of 1832 ending with a bulb dome.

The interior of the building is a Latin cross and a single nave, covered by a barrel vault, which begins with an endo narthex with arches hosting an organ, while the span closes with a large central dome. The rooms are influenced by the late Baroque taste and are embellished by round arches that surmount the chapels on the side walls of the longitudinal body. In one of them is preserved the statue of San Giovanni, placed on an elaborate wooden structure, in turn supported by stone elements and a baptismal font. At the bottom of the church, behind the polychrome altar, in an articulated Baroque shrine is kept the statue of San Rocco, whose celebrations fall on August 16; very beautiful also the effigy of San Michele, as the marble and wood pergamum.