Gioia del Colle · Turi · Sammichele di Bari · Casamassima · BA
Four towns in the province of Bari on the edge of the Murge. The Ministry of Culture's records place Turi on the first spurs of the plateau and Casamassima at its foot, while the 1933 Enciclopedia Italiana sets Gioia del Colle in the saddle between the north-western Murge and the south-eastern ones. The most concrete link is the vine: the production regulations of the Gioia del Colle DOC, read in a copy still to be re-checked against the ministerial text, include all four municipalities in the production area. The theme of the masserie, on the other hand, holds up poorly: the sources consulted hardly mention them, and in Turi the cherry counts for more than the grape. What remains is a journey of stone, for those who love castles, excavations and fiefs, with a Peucetian site at its centre. The order of the stops and the division into days are our proposal.
At a glance
Duration. 3 days.
The route
Day 1 — Gioia del Colle
The castle of Gioia del Colle stands at about 360 metres, and according to the record of the Direzione regionale Musei Puglia its plan is a large quadrangular courtyard enclosed by towers and curtain walls of squared ashlar. The same record reads three periods in it, pre-Norman, Norman and Swabian, plus the twentieth-century restorations; the Enciclopedia Italiana says it was begun in the early 12th century by Riccardo Siniscalco, of the Norman house of the Altavilla, and rebuilt by Frederick II in 1230. In the same 1933 entry the territory is a vast limestone area with small water tables underground, vineyards, olive groves and almond groves, and in the higher parts pastures, scrub and woodland. In 1933 the Enciclopedia Italiana noted in the entrance hall Romanesque capitals signed by the sculptors Mele da Stigliano and Finarro da Canosa. Since 1977 the castle has housed the Museo Archeologico Nazionale with the finds from Monte Sannace: Peucetian pottery, a Corinthian black-figure krater from the middle of the 6th century BC, an antefix with a Gorgon's head that came from the acropolis. The DOC regulations, still to be re-checked, describe for the vineyards red soils formed by the dissolution of limestone rocks, and attribute to the abbot Francesco Filippo Indellicati, in 1799, the first clonal selection of Primitivo in contrada Terzi, and from 1820 the variety spread to other municipalities; Mozzarella di Gioia del Colle is a PDO under a European regulation of 9 December 2020, but already in 1933 Treccani wrote of a town known for mozzarella and wool. During the war, Treccani writes again, d'Annunzio set off from a makeshift airfield near the town for the bombing of Cattaro. The next day you leave towards Turi, along the provincial road of the excavations.
Day 2 — Monte Sannace and Turi
At kilometre 4.5 of provincial road 61 you enter the Parco archeologico di Monte Sannace, which the Ministry of Culture's page defines as one of the most important indigenous sites of pre-Roman Peucetia. The remains range from the Iron Age to the early Imperial Roman age, but the flourishing, according to the same page, falls between the 6th and the 3rd century BC, and in the second half of the 4th century BC a circuit of walls separated the acropolis from the settlement on the plain. It is the walls that explain the city: according to the University of Bari a first circuit enclosed the acropolis, a second the western quarters; then two more, a few decades later, and the last enclosed the whole settlement; and a preserved stretch, more than three metres high, still has a gate. On the acropolis you can see large tombs, a public building known as the stoa, a Hellenistic house and painted tombs under a canopy, among them no. 8, from the early 3rd century BC; on the plain, among the shop-houses of the insulae, a stone pressorium for oil has come to light. The two visitor routes, archaeological and naturalistic, start from the Masseria Montanaro, near the entrance.
Turi stands at about 250 metres, on the first spurs of the Murgia, and the ministerial record recognises there an important Peucetian settlement between the Archaic age and the 4th century BC: the same people as Monte Sannace. In 1269 the town appears among the casali of the Terra di Bari in the registers of the Angevin Chancery; the Moles, in 1547, remade the castle into a noble palace, and the marquises of Venusio, who bought the fief in 1741, gave it its present appearance. Stretches of the enlarged walls remain in via Putignano and in via Orlandi. The International Gramsci Society places in Turi the imprisonment of Antonio Gramsci from 19 July 1928 to 19 November 1933, with prisoner number 7047: here, in 1929, he began the notebooks. Whether the prison can be visited, the sources do not say. The municipality writes that cherries cover almost half of the territory and celebrates the Ferrovia with a festival in June, at harvest time. From Turi the journey bends towards Sammichele.
Day 3 — Sammichele di Bari and Casamassima
In Sammichele the castle has a square plan of just over twenty metres per side, with two slightly projecting towers on the eastern façade, according to the Ministry of Culture's catalogue. The first certain record, according to the 2024 ICCD record, is a date carved on the arch of the portal, 1504: the Genoese banker Hieronimo Centurione, lord of the place, added beside the tower a chapel for Maria Maddalena. The town was born from a purchase: in 1609 the Portuguese Miguel Vaaz bought fief and castle; he took in a colony of Serbs who were refugees from Dalmatia, in a quarter called Casa Vaaz. The sources do not agree on the year in which the Serbs left; they agree that the village was repopulated from the neighbouring centres and took the name of San Michele. In 1675 the castle was rebuilt, and in the second half of the nineteenth century the architect Ascanio Amenduni, from Casamassima, gave it crenellated towers, a rusticated façade and pointed-arch mullioned windows; the municipality bought it in 1971. Inside is the Museo della civiltà contadina dedicated to Vito Donato Bianco, professor of chemistry at the University of Bari; the museum's website counts over five thousand objects in fifteen rooms, from the wine cycle to the oil cycle. The Città dell'Olio points out two menhirs along the old road to Taranto, and a guide hosted by the Regione describes the zampina, a spiral sausage in kid or lamb casing, with a festival dedicated to it.
Casamassima is close on paper too: Vaaz also bought this fief, and the record of the castle of Sammichele recalls Domenico Giuseppe Caracciolo, duke of Vietri and Casamassima. At the foot of the Murge, near the Lama San Giorgio, the ministerial record describes a medieval village pressed around the lord's residence; in the village open the blind alleys called “chiassi”, among blue plasterwork. The thread, here, is the defences of that village and what remains of them. It is an ancient centre: the first document is from 962, in the Codice diplomatico barese; the fief is certain from 1179, and in 1348 the village suffered the sack by Hungarian troops. Of the some thirty-three towers of the walls only one remains, quadrangular, the castle's donjon; of the medieval core the bell tower and the apse of the mother church survive. Among the gates, Porta Orologio was rebuilt in 1841 to a design by Angelo Michele Pesce, with a tower and a tholos with small Doric columns. To the Acquaviva dates back the monastery of Santa Chiara, founded in 1573 as an orphanage wanted by Antonio Acquaviva d'Aragona. The last memory is from the twentieth century: the Museum of Polish History recalls the Polish military cemetery, consecrated in 1946, the southernmost and the smallest of the Polish cemeteries in Italy, with the fallen of the Gustav Line and an altar with the Madonna della Porta dell'Alba of Vilnius. The journey, in our proposal, ends here.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 10 defects corrected · not approved