Manfredonia · Monte Sant'Angelo · San Giovanni Rotondo · Foresta Umbra · Vieste · FG
In the Middle Ages, the municipality recalls, Monte Sant'Angelo was a stage on the itinerary “Homo, Angelus, Deus”, and this journey treats it as such: it starts from the coast, climbs to the grotto of the Archangel and from there follows the other roads that reach it. The thread is not ours. The Gargano National Park describes a Via dei pellegrini from Vieste and a via Sacra-Langobardorum from Benevento; the 2015 map-guide “Discovering Puglia” traces routes from Siponto and from San Giovanni Rotondo; the municipality's page recalls that the medieval itinerary “Homo, Angelus, Deus” linked the sanctuary to Rome, Compostela and the Holy Land. It must be said honestly that the Park's pages stop at 2023 and the map-guide at 2015: the routes need to be reconfirmed with the bodies concerned. The order of the stages is our own proposal.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Manfredonia and Siponto
The journey begins on the coast, in front of a basilica made of air. In the archaeological park of Siponto the work by Edoardo Tresoldi, installed in 2016, redraws in wire mesh the last phase of the Early Christian basilica: according to the Ministry of Culture it is 14 metres high and weighs about seven tonnes. Siponto was a Roman colony from 194 BC and one of the main ports of the Regio II; there remain the 4th-century mosaics and Santa Maria Maggiore, a cube topped by a small dome, with a portal on columns resting on lions. On the end of the ancient city the Ministry's two records do not agree; they agree instead that the people of Siponto moved to the new city of King Manfred, which the record for the historic centre officially dates to 1263. The walls arose from an agreement of November 1277 with a “master Giordano of Monte Sant'Angelo”, and already here the mountain enters the history of the coast. In the castle, donated to the State in 1968 and opened as a museum in 1980, the Ministry keeps a collection of Daunian stelae, slabs of the 8th-6th century BC with ornaments or with weapons, whose first core Silvio Ferri recovered in the Sixties in the countryside around Siponto. At the locality of Lama Volara, San Leonardo di Siponto, of the 12th century, is, for an article in the journal In_Bo of the University of Bologna, the start of an itinerary of about 40 km towards Siponto and Pulsano. The route of the 2015 map-guide from Siponto to the sanctuary was called “Impronte dell'Arcangelo”.
Day 2 — Monte Sant'Angelo
At 843 metres, on a limestone spur, Monte Sant'Angelo is, for the Ministry's record, the highest town of the Gargano; the settlement, whose first written sources date back to 812, grew shortly before the year One Thousand near the grotto. You go down 86 steps to the “Porta del Toro”, where the municipality's page points out the marks left by pilgrims; then the bronze doors, cast in Constantinople in 1076. Below, the Lombard crypts preserve inscriptions of the dukes of Benevento: this is the sanctuary that the ICOMOS evaluation calls the “national” one of the Lombards, and which since 25 June 2011 has been part of the UNESCO site of the Lombards in Italy. The octagonal bell tower, 27 metres high, takes Castel del Monte as its model. Outside, the Junno quarter lines up houses often of a single room with cistern and fireplace, linked by arches and stairways. At the baptistery of San Giovanni in Tumba one learns a lesson in method: the municipal library explains that the name “Tomba di Rotari” arises from a misreading of the word “tumba” in an epigraph, while a parchment of 1087 attributes the building to Paganus, magister of Siponto, and to Rodelgrim. Up top the castle, begun in the first half of the 9th century by the Lombard bishop Orso I, was the residence of Bianca Lancia under Frederick II and then an Angevin state prison: the municipality's page records as held there Filippa di Antiochia and Queen Giovanna, probably killed there in 1328. It was at Monte Sant'Angelo, in 1095, that the Norman count Enrico issued the founding charter of the town where the journey goes tomorrow.
Day 3 — San Giovanni Rotondo
According to the Ministry's record, San Giovanni Rotondo was born as a medieval town on 14 November 1095, with that charter signed at Monte Sant'Angelo, on a site already inhabited, as numerous tombs show. The town follows the ground and shields itself from the wind of the valley. Frederick II girded it with walls and towers and had Sant'Onofrio built, with an inscription of 1231 that calls him “Emperor and Lord of San Giovanni Rotondo”. Of the walls some traces remain, and the Porta del Lago was demolished in 1876; a surviving cylindrical tower houses the Museo delle Arti Popolari. In the 20th century the town spread westwards, towards the friary and the hospital. The friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie was founded in 1540 “by unanimous wish of the people”. Here, according to the italia.it portal, Padre Pio lived from 1916, received the stigmata in 1918 in the choir of the old church and stayed fifty-two years; Renzo Piano's church of San Pio has a plan that recalls the spiral of Archimedes. In May 1956 the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza was inaugurated, which the friar wanted to be a “temple of prayer and of science”. From the town the map-guide's “Sentiero dell'Angelo” returns towards the mountain; tomorrow we go further, into the forest and towards the sea.
Day 4 — Foresta Umbra and Vieste
The Park describes the Foresta Umbra as the heart of the Park, a belt of beeches and pines on the promontory, and it is a component of the UNESCO site “Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe” (ancient primeval beech forests of the Carpathians and other regions of Europe, our translation). It indicates there a network of about 54 km with 15 routes waymarked in yellow and, at Villaggio Umbra, a museum and an information desk; duration and difficulty of the trails are not written. Then Vieste, from which the Park starts the Via dei pellegrini. The medieval core occupies Punta San Francesco, among lanes, stairways and arches. In 1176, the Ministry's record recalls, Pope Alexander III left from here to meet Frederick I in Venice; in 1554 the Turks killed a large part of the population, and on the “Chianca amara” the people of Vieste were beheaded. The castle, dated 1240, was enlarged in 1537 by the viceroy Pietro da Toledo and is today in use by the Navy; the earthquake of 1772 brought down the façade and bell tower of the cathedral. The detail that remains is on the island of Sant'Eufemia: according to the University of Bari a grotto there was a sanctuary of Venus Sosandra already at the end of the 2nd century BC, with about two hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions, at least four dedicated to Venus Sosandra and one by the doge Pietro II Orseolo in 1002; after 1867 the lighthouse keepers carved their own names there, erasing ancient inscriptions. In the hinterland of Vieste, in the archaeological park of Santa Maria di Merino, the Early Christian necropolis of the Salata counts six hypogea of the 4th-6th century. From Vieste, forty kilometres of the Via dei pellegrini lead back to the Angel.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 15 defects corrected · not approved