Lesina · San Nicandro Garganico · Cagnano Varano · Carpino · FG
On the northern side of the Gargano, according to the Park, two lagoons lie side by side, and between them rises Monte d'Elio. All four municipalities on this journey are in the Parco Nazionale del Gargano. The thread is shallow water and those who have lived on it: at Lesina the sources document fishponds as early as the 8th century, at Varano monks who fished for eels and grey mullet. The theme holds fully for Lesina, on its lagoon, and for Cagnano Varano and Carpino, which the Park links to the Varano lagoon. For San Nicandro it holds only in part: its connection with the water runs through a long lawsuit over the civic use rights of the Lesina lagoon, known from a private source, and through the abandoned town of Devia, which the Park places between the lagoons.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Lesina, the town on the peninsula
The historic centre of Lesina occupies, according to the Ministry of Culture's record, a small peninsula on the south-western shore of the lagoon, about five metres above the sea. The same record recalls what the lagoon position offered: fishing, farming and landing places towards the sea; and as early as the 8th century water mills, fishponds and fish-preserving techniques are attested. From 718 the documents speak of a gastaldate; at the end of the 10th century Lesina was the seat of the Byzantine turma that defended the northern border of the Catepanate, and in 1047 it became the first Norman county. Then came the earthquake of 1627, which, the record writes, heavily damaged the town, which was rebuilt inside the medieval walls, now completely destroyed; the Chiesa Madre was rebuilt and consecrated in 1691. A private publication adds that the sea withdrew, emptying the lagoon, before a wave submerged the town. In the old core there remain the Chiesa Madre, the Palazzo Vescovile in via Vittorio Veneto, the bishop's seat between 1254 and 1459, and the church of the Madonna del Rosario e di San Primiano on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, single-naved with a lunetted barrel vault, placed under protection in 2021. From the mid-19th century the town has spread towards the inland. The water, from here, is for the next day.
Day 2 — The Lesina lagoon and the Sacca Orientale
In via Banchina Vollaro the municipality points to the Visitor Centre of the Parco della Laguna, with excursions and boat trips. A private publication describes it in three sections: an aquarium of fourteen tanks, a natural history museum with dioramas and a botanical garden, and the ethnographic museum “La Casa del Pescatore”, with fishing gear and a reconstructed dwelling. For the association Amici delle Lagune del Gargano the lagoon is 22 kilometres long, parallel to the Adriatic, with an average depth of about seventy centimetres; eels were long a source of income for Lesina, and fishing is still done with the sandalo, the paranza and the lavoriero. The neighbouring towns, the Park notes, call it “Pantano”. For the association, the eastern inlet has been a state nature reserve since 1981. Over the lake and the Sacca Orientale, according to an article in Lettere Meridiane, Lesina and San Nicandro have contested the civic use rights: a ruling in 1928, settlements in the 1930s, farm labourers' occupations in the 1960s, up to the rejection of San Nicandro's claim in 2018. It is the road that leads inland.
Day 3 — San Nicandro Garganico, Devia and Torre Mileto
The Terra Vecchia of San Nicandro, for the Park, is made of narrow alleys, external stairs with a small landing, whitewashed houses and buttress arches between one house and the next. In the upper part stands the castle, quadrilateral in plan with two round towers and two square ones; after 1834 it became a noble residence. The saint of the name has changed: at the beginning of the 17th century, the Park writes, a friar brought relics from Venafro and the cult passed to San Nicandro the martyr, with Marciano and Daria. The town's name, changed to Sannicandro in 1861, went back to San Nicandro Garganico in 1998. At Palazzo Fioritto the Museo della Civiltà Contadina, founded in 1997 as a private initiative and later made public, holds about three thousand objects donated by the population, in thirteen rooms with the workshops of a carpenter, shoemaker, blacksmith and tinsmith.
Outside the town, on the western slope of Monte d'Elio, the Park points to the town of Devia: in the 11th century a community of Slavic origin is documented there, and it became depopulated at the end of the 14th century, perhaps because of Saracen raids; the final abandonment, for the Park, dates from the 18th century. What remains is Santa Maria di Monte d'Elio, a three-naved Romanesque church with 12th-13th-century frescoes. Not far away the Grotta dell'Angelo, investigated through excavations by the Istituto di Paletnologia of the University of Florence, has yielded flints from the Palaeolithic and can be visited only with lamps. On the coast, Torre Mileto has a structure datable to the mid-16th century; in the 19th century it was a telegraph base for the Tremiti, then a barracks of the Guardia di Finanza, and, restored in 2005, it now houses a visitor centre of the Park.
Day 4 — Cagnano Varano and Carpino
The Varano lagoon, for the Park, measures about 6,500 hectares, reaches 5.8 metres in depth at the centre and presumably formed around the year 1000; the Capojale outlet was dug between 1917 and 1920 for military purposes. Mussel farming, begun in 1925, is today the main activity, and in summer phytoplankton blooms lower the oxygen. On the west shore, at San Nicola degli Imbuti, the Benedictine monks of the 11th century fished for eels and grey mullet and made bottarga from the roe; in the First World War a seaplane base was built there, now in decay. About nine hundred metres from the south shore, a hundred metres higher, the Grotta di San Michele is a karst cavity of about fifty metres with stalactites, medieval graffiti and a spring behind the altar. In the town the “Lu Caut” quarter was settled, the Park writes, by those fleeing the lake shores, the marshes and malaria; the houses are half cave and half stone, and five gates were closed at night. “Varano” was added to the name in September 1862.
Carpino lies, for the Park, between the lake of Varano and the Foresta Umbra, with the historic centre gathered around the castle and the external stairs with landings. In the Norman period it was a fief of the Honour of Monte Sant'Angelo granted to the county of Lesina: the journey thus returns to its starting point. In the Piana di Carpino, the Roman villa of Avicenna, from the 1st century BC, was used as a burial ground until around the 7th century AD; the finds, in the 1960s, went to the Museo archeologico di Bari. The Park recalls that the town produces over twenty thousand quintals of oil a year and the Carpino broad bean, a Slow Food presidium.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 13 defects corrected · not approved