There is a great deal of information, reliable or otherwise, that revolve around the birth of the site and the cults close to it. A first written testimony attributed to the bishop of Bisceglie Pompeo Sarnelli, dated 1680, confirms that the site was founded thanks to Pope Grogorio Magno starting from the year 591, with the finances of his family. According to this legendary reconstruction, the cave had the role of grancia of the hypothetical Abbey of Barsento in the territory of Noci, hypothetical because the latter never assumed this role.
According to some quotations present in the volume "Putignanesi ephemerides, or successes and history of the city of Putignano" by Fra Domenico Campanella (1745), considered quite improbable due to the incongruity of historical tools available to the author himself in the reconstruction phases, place the beginning of the Michaelic cult witnessed by Sarnelli following the legendary pagan cult of Apollo and supplanted by the hand of General Tulliano.
Even the lawyer Giovanni Casulli in his manuscript "Le Memorie" tells of the Grotta di San Michele mediating the ancient part between the version of Sarnelli and that of Campanella and adding historical information about the centuries to come, having had the opportunity to access the documentary information made available to the abbey of Santo Stefano in Monopoli.
The first certain and documented news about the church of San Michele Arcangelo in Monte Laureto dates back to 1098 when Count Goffredo di Conversano granted the privileges of the territory, including that in which the underground church is located, to the Monastery of Santo Stefano di Monopoli. In 1195 the territory goes under the protection of Henry VI. Since 1317, the territories of reference, including the one where the cave is located, passed into the hands of the Giovannites. In 1332 the territory passed under the protection of King Roberto D'Angiò who took it away from the control of Gualtieri VI, Duke of Brienne, Athens and Lecce, who in the meantime had taken it away from the Gerosolomitani of Monopoli. Later, in the sixteenth century, the site became the prerogative of the Carmelites.
There are several historians and scholars who have cited and studied the cave located in Monte Laureto in Putignano below; A, Vinaccia (1915), R. Marascelli (1933), G. Gabrieli (1936), A. Medea (1939), A. Venditti (1967), G. Uggeri (1979).
Giuseppe Napolitano, scholar and local historian, while citing the historical attributions (Apollo Temple and Pope Gregory the Great) distances himself from them and connects the cave to the Basilian monks to their forced emigration from the East due to iconoclasm and connects the name Laureto as a deriving from the "Basilian Laura".
We continue with the historians who reported the underground church in their studies, Silvia Bettocchi, Armando Petruci, Giorgio Otranto, Ada Campione, Clara Gelao, Aldo Messina and Franco dell'Aquila, L.M. De Palma, D. Lorusso and V. Manghisi to close with the Putignan volunteer Elisabetta Nardelli, up to the drafting of the latest publication entirely dedicated to the cave dated 2018 entitled "San Michele in Monte Laureto in Putignano. The angel's cave and culture pictorial Angevin in the south of Bari "by Marcello Mignozzi.