Lands of abbesses and of knights

Rutigliano · Conversano · Putignano · Noci · BA

Four centres south-east of Bari, all in the province of Bari, which by different routes looked towards Conversano. There, according to a volume from the Basilicata University Press, one of the first Norman counties was born; the first records of Putignano, from the 10th century, according to the Ministry of Culture's record tie it to Conversano; Rutigliano became a “castellum” perhaps in order to make itself independent of it; in the modern age Noci entered its county and remained there until 1806. The second thread is that of the lords in religious habit: the mitred abbesses of Conversano, the monks of Monopoli and then the knights of Rhodes and of Malta at Putignano, the canons of San Nicola at Rutigliano. It is a journey for those who love reading towns through their walls, their gates and their archives. The theme of the trulli, which we had imagined, finds support in none of the sources read.

The route

Day 1 — Rutigliano

You climb to the Torre Normanna, on the top of a hill at about 130 metres: for the FAI it is the keep of the castle that the Normans restructured and enlarged at the beginning of the 12th century, and there the inhabitants of Azetium, Tomegna, Bigetti and Casilio gathered. It is the same story that the ministerial record tells with caution: a centre attested from the middle of the 11th century, perhaps born from the union of small settlements in the countryside, which at the end of the century passes from “loco” to “castellum”, probably because of the Norman presence and the wish for autonomy from Conversano. The town has remained concentric, pressed between the tower and the collegiate church of Santa Maria della Colonna; the walls are reduced to fragments, but the perimeter can be read, with three gates: Porta Castello, Porta di Bari, Porta Siconis. For centuries Rutigliano was a fief of the Chapter of San Nicola di Bari, which between 1646 and 1708 leased it to the Caraffa dukes of Noja. In the collegiate church, consecrated in 1108 by bishop Sasso according to the FAI. Again according to the FAI, a marble lectern bears the inscription of an “Ugo” son of “Asgot” and the symbol of the Bassavilla, later passed into the city's coat of arms; there is also a polyptych by Antonio Vivarini. In the former Dominican convent the Museo Civico del Fischietto in Terracotta keeps the prize-winning works of the national competition born in January 1989. The catalogue record links the whistles to the fair of Sant'Antonio Abate, at the end of January, when Carnival begins, and reports an oral tradition: during a feast of the Saint the neighbours from Noicattaro were driven off with whistles. Tomorrow, the city from which Rutigliano, perhaps, wanted to make itself independent.

Day 2 — Conversano

At the base of the castle's Torre Maestra one can see, the Ministry of Culture writes, megalithic walls of the 6th–4th century BC: Conversano stands on the Peucetian centre of Norba, and according to the university volume the medieval circuit partly retraces its line. Above those stones the Norman tower, the only surviving Norman tower, about 25 metres high, was begun in the 11th century by count Goffredo. From the fifteenth century the Acquaviva made the castle a residence: Giulio Antonio added the cylindrical tower, his son Andrea Matteo the polygonal battered tower, designed against artillery. The university volume describes a calcareous and permeable soil, without rivers, where water collected in natural lakes in the hollows of red earth, in wells and cisterns that the Conversano charters record from the 10th century. The cathedral was rebuilt at the end of the 13th century, with a window attributed to Facitolo da Bari, and a medieval fresco survived the fire of 1911. The detail that remains is in the monastery of San Benedetto, today an archaeological museum: from 1266 Cistercian nuns took over there, and their mitred abbesses exercised feudal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction for centuries. An essay by F. Sportelli describes the hand-kissing: the priests, even those of Castellana, knelt before the abbess under the canopy, with crosier and mitre; in 1709 Rome reduced it to a bow, in 1810 Joachim Murat abolished those powers. In the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano, consecrated in 1660, and in the castle's picture gallery, with the “Gerusalemme Liberata”, you look at Paolo Finoglio. The day after, Putignano.

Day 3 — Putignano

Putignano stands on three small hills, says the Ministry of Culture's record, and its early medieval core had at its centre the mother church of San Pietro and the castle, whose remains are incorporated into the Palazzo del Balì, on corso Vittorio Emanuele. The town had religious lords for over seven centuries: from 1086 to 1385 the Benedictines of Monopoli, from 1358 to 1806 the knights of Rhodes and of Malta. In 1394 the relics of santo Stefano arrived from the Monopoli abbey, and the ministerial record traces the origin of the Carnival back to that episode; the FAI specifies that the knights brought them, to protect them from pirates, to Santa Maria la Greca: a silver reliquary with a fragment of the saint's skull and an icon of the Madonna Odigitria. In the same church there is a late-medieval wooden Lamentation of northern European iconography. On 26 December, the saint's feast, the Festa delle Propaggini opens the Carnival. In 1472 a new circuit of walls, with twenty-six towers and two gates, roughly followed the line of the present Extramurale, around which the first factories rose between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Of the Porta del Barsento a tower remains. The same record recalls the 1985 protection order on the wooded areas in the locality of Barsento, in the municipalities of Noci, Alberobello and Putignano. On state road 172, in the territory of Putignano, the Grotta del Trullo, discovered in 1931, opens beneath about a metre and a half of rock; ISPRA calls it the “first tourist site of Puglia”. Tomorrow, towards the Barsento.

Day 4 — Noci

In Noci the alleys end in the “gnostre”, the small open spaces at the end of the lanes that the ministerial record describes around the mother church, founded in the 12th century; you enter the medieval village through Porta Putignano. A document of 1188 names a place of worship: archbishop Rainaldo of Bari entrusts to the bishop of Conversano Rutigliano and “Sanctam Mariam de Nucibus”; in 1240 Frederick II orders the inhabitants to contribute to the upkeep of the castle of Ruvo. The origin from a Byzantine castrum remains a hypothesis of the historian Pietro Gioja, from 1839. The Torre Civica in piazza Plebiscito dates from 1823; in the Cappella della Trinità a cycle of late Gothic frescoes survives, with gaps. In the countryside, Santa Maria di Barsento is a rural church of the 11th–12th century. About a kilometre from the centre, the sanctuary of the Madonna della Croce began in 1483 as a chapel for a fourteenth-century fresco; it has a roof of chiancarelle, a small wood of Macedonian oaks with the grotto, benches for pilgrims and a mounting block. The record rejects the legend of the shepherds who supposedly found the fresco there: the grotto is rather a crevice. According to the FAI, in the Benedictine abbey of the Madonna della Scala, in a pine wood of the southern Murgia, the monks copy by hand and restore ancient books. The journey, in our proposal, ends among those books.

DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 15 defects corrected · not approved