The structure remained a place of prayer and worship until 1866 when, following the unification of Italy and by virtue of the law on the suppression of religious congregations (royal decree 3036), the monastery was devolved to the State property and used as a barracks for real Carabinieri.

An essential convent, with the central cloister surrounded by the refectory and service rooms, small cells and a library on the first floor, which was decorated in the eighteenth century and called the Sala del Priore.

Attached to the convent is the church of Santa Maria della Pietà, which once donated to the Congregation of Our Lady of Sorrows was dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua.

In the second Chapel stands the Madonna del Latte: below the same Marian iconography there is a part of the fresco that bears a fleet of galleys, a clear reference to the Naval Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

The large hall of the refectory has a majestic eighteenth-century fresco depicting the Last Supper above which, inside an oval, the Immaculate Conception appears.

The ground floor houses two of the most exceptional discoveries that have occurred since the sixties: the Tomb of the Athlete, discovered in 1970 in via Salentina and the reproduction of Zeus, a masterpiece of Magna Graecia bronzes, found in Ugento, in via Fabio Pittore in 1961 and kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto.