Historians of architecture have always drawn a distinct line between civic and religious architecture. Although this separation allows for easier classification of the vast heritage of architecture, it is not adequate for analysing certain realities that, by their very nature, fall between the two categories. An example of this is confraternal architectural production that developed extensively, in a variety of forms and environments, in the Catholic world from the thirteenth century to the present. As lay institutions with religious aims, confraternities gave birth to a special type of architecture, distinctive because of its combination of lay and religious elements, and because it was not restricted to sacred buildings. This architecture presents a complexity and an originality borne out of the close relationship to its various devotional aspects and, above all, to the social-charitable role played by these organizations.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Lucantoni, F., (2025), "Historical Notes on the Architecture of Italian Confraternities", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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Original publication: Lucantoni, Francesco. “Historical Notes on the Architecture of Italian Confraternities.” Confraternitas 17 (2): 2010. 3-27. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.