"There are certain moments in life that, taking place in the prestige of the most varied poetry, connect so tenaciously to the soul, that with the passing of time, it is in futile to erase them". With these words Giacinto Poli was beginning Una processione del Venerdì Santo, published in Naples in 1851 and written with a poetic and passionate prose. The narrative, almost like a wavering and sad processional stride, oscillates between introspection and the description and allows the reader to experience the frame of mind of the writer and the emotions of the narrated events. The words of Giacinto Poli confirm the ancient visceral attachment of Molfetta's inhabitants to the rites related to the Holy Week. The funeral marches are undoubtedly an integral and indispensable part of those rites, because they provide the most spontaneous and immediate musical comment. They play a dual task: they translate into musical affections what is taking place and reinterpret with melodic, fluid and only seemingly obvious vein the lesson of the ancient Neapolitan music school. That musical teaching, exemplarily ferried into the nineteenth century by Fedele Fenaroli (1730-1818), Niccolo Zingarelli (1752-1837) and by Altamura's denizen Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870), is expressed in the marches immediately and effectively through musical ideas of composers from Molfetta and other localities who, between the 1700s and the 1800s, formed the Molfettese repertoire of the marches, integrating it with loans and reductions from melodramas. This last aspect of the reduction from opera tells furthermore how much the melodrama was widespread, heard, appreciated, re-interpreted and executed in multiple forms (often far from the original) at a time when it was hard to benefit from it (except in the theater) due to the absence of the diffusion through recordings. The funeral march becomes an anthology of the most famous arias in an opera and is transformed into a new and unusual bridge between sacred and profane.