Canosa di Puglia · San Ferdinando di Puglia · Trinitapoli · Margherita di Savoia · BT
Four comuni in the province of Barletta-Andria-Trani that the website of the Parco naturale regionale Fiume Ofanto counts all among the eleven comuni of the Park, established by regional law no. 37 of 2007. The journey descends from the tombs and the Roman bridge of Canosa to the coast of the salt works. The thread rests on two documented facts: the river, because the four comuni all have territory in the Ofanto Park, and salt, because according to the Ministry of Culture's record the colony of San Ferdinando was to be populated by families from the Saline di Barletta, today's Margherita di Savoia. It must be said honestly that no official source read links the salt works to the Ofanto and that on Margherita di Savoia the sources are scarce. It is a journey for those seeking archaeology and plains of water.
At a glance
Duration. 3 days.
The route
Day 1 — Canosa di Puglia
The day begins on the river. Along the SP231 the Roman bridge over the Ofanto rests on five stone arches: the Comune's record says it was built on the via Traiana, restored by the Bourbons and still today straddling the provinces of Barletta-Andria-Trani and Foggia. The same road explains the Arco Traiano in via Cerignola, which the Comune dates between 108 and 110 AD and measures at 13 metres high. But the city of the dead is older than that road. The Ipogei Lagrasta are three hypogea of Canusium carved into the tufa, dated by the Comune between the end of the 4th and the 1st century BC; the Ipogeo del Cerbero is a simple tomb in the clay with a 3rd-century BC fresco of the hound of the underworld, read as an image of the passage to the afterlife; the two Scocchera hypogea were discovered by chance in 1895. Daunian vases, Apulian red-figure vases and polychrome Canosan vases are displayed, according to the Comune's record, in the museum of Palazzo Sinesi. Then the Christian churches: San Leucio, a 6th-century church now in ruins, rose according to the Comune on a Hellenistic temple dedicated to Minerva and was rededicated in the Lombard period; the Battistero di San Giovanni, dodecagonal, preserves at its centre the remains of a heptagonal basin with traces of mosaic and gilded glass tesserae. The Basilica di San Sabino, a national monument, was dedicated to the saint by Pope Paschal II on 7 September 1101 and became a cathedral in 1916. Wikipedia, to be re-verified, adds the Mausoleum of Bohemond, built after 1111. The next day you follow the river downstream.
Day 2 — San Ferdinando di Puglia and the lower Ofanto
San Ferdinando stands, according to the Ofanto Park, on a small rise on the left of the river; the Ministry of Culture's record defines it as a plain centre of recent origins, at 68 metres in the valley. It is a town born of a project, and in its origin there is salt too. Ferdinand II of Bourbon, writes the record, wanted an agricultural colony to strengthen the agriculture of the southern Tavoliere, to be populated with families from the Saline di Barletta; Vincenzo Zito, in the abstract of an essay published in Storia Urbana, links the foundation, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the overcrowding of the Reali Saline. The project provided for each family a farmhouse and ten versure of land, and for common use one hundred versure of pasture and sixty of vineyard and fruit trees. The nucleus grew from the casale of San Cassano, with a fabric that the record calls rigorously geometric, a grid. In 1848 the colony took the name of San Ferdinando, in honour of Ferdinand III of Castile and León, the king's patron saint, and in 1863 a royal decree added "di Puglia". In Piazza Costituzione the Torre dell'Orologio, of the early twentieth century, rises above the well that gave water to the colony of San Cassano. The former Palazzo di Città, of 1847, houses the Museo Civico, founded in 1984 according to the Park, with finds from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages and farm tools.
In its lower course the river is a river held back. In its lower course, writes the Park, the Ofanto is embanked along its entire bed, and at the mouth wetlands of naturalistic interest remain. The Park's page on the mouth explains why the erosion of the coast has accelerated: the river, about 170 km long, had a deltaic cusp projecting about 1000 metres; after the middle of the twentieth century seven artificial reservoirs reduced its inputs to about 10% of the original ones, and the shore retreats by three or four metres a year. The next day, salt.
Day 3 — Trinitapoli and Margherita di Savoia
At Trinitapoli the journey goes underground. The Parco Archeologico degli Ipogei, which italia.it places just outside the town, gathers according to the regional record CartApulia fifteen structures carved into the limestone, used first for rites linked to the cult of the Mother Earth goddess and then as burials of the local warrior elite; owned by the Comune, it was inaugurated on 18 July 2020. The park's website, a source to be re-verified, dates the excavation of the hypogea in the rock to around 1800 BC and the rites to at least eight hundred years; the largest have an access corridor, a hall of up to 20 metres and always a cylindrical shaft. The same website writes that the bodies were covered with salt, available in the area, against decomposition, and describes the grave goods: in the Ipogeo dei Bronzi six swords and the "Signora delle ambre" with over 200 amber beads; in that of the Avori a young man with a dagger and two ivory boars; in the Gigante an adult with a single worn arrowhead. The history of the town, in the ministry's record of the historic centre, passes through an inhabitant of Salpi who gives the land to the Benedictines of the Trinità di Monte Sacro, on the Gargano: around their church of the Trinità grew the casale that took its name. Its position on the transhumance routes brought shepherds from Abruzzo; between the 14th and 15th centuries a Slav colony arrived, while Salpi was emptying. From 1589 to the end of the eighteenth century the casale was a Commenda Magistrale of the Knights of Malta, and the Palazzo dei Commendatori, in Piazza Umberto I, is today the town hall. In 1863 a royal decree changed the name of Casaltrinità to Trinitapoli.
On Margherita di Savoia the sources are poor. The Comune writes that Pliny the Elder already speaks of the salt works and describes the Torrione, of the 16th century, as a lookout and defence structure against Turkish raids. The italia.it portal speaks of a strip of brackish marshes parallel to the coast for about 20 km, a protected area since 1977, exploited industrially with canals and pans above all in the nineteenth century, under Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies; among the birds it names the grey heron, little egret, night heron and squacco heron. The Museo Storico delle Saline, according to the same page, preserves about a thousand artefacts, including evaporographs and instruments for weighing salt. From these salt works the Bourbon project wanted to draw the colonists of San Ferdinando. The journey, in our proposal, ends on the sandy shore of about 15 km that the Comune describes.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 14 defects corrected · not approved