Lame, oil mills and bell towers in the Bari basin

Triggiano · Cellamare · Noicattaro · Adelfia · BA

Four towns south and south-east of Bari, all in the province of Bari, which no source gathers under a single name: the grouping is ours. The thread that links them holds only in part, and it is the countryside. The Ministry of Culture's record links the economy of Triggiano to almonds and olive trees; the municipality of Cellamare tells of stone oil mills driven by animals; in Noicattaro the theatre was born in an oil mill of the dukes; Adelfia, according to the 1929 Enciclopedia Italiana, was among the wine-producing centres of the Terra di Bari. Beneath, the limestone cut by the lame, the erosional furrows that the sources mention at Triggiano and at Adelfia; at Noicattaro, a territory of the lame under a protection order. It is a journey for those who look for small stories: churches rebuilt several times, the castle of Cellamare turned into a residence, a plague, two villages that became one municipality.

The route

Day 1 — Triggiano

Under the medieval apse of Santa Maria Veterana opens a chapel covered by cross vaults; access is not verified (according to the municipality: “Information not available”). The municipality reconstructs a layered history: even earlier there was the church of San Martino, the first parish church, datable to 983, with a Santa Croce carved in the “gripta”; Santa Maria Veterana would have been founded, the record writes with a “hypothetically”, around 1080 by Leone, a priest and master of dialectic from Bari. In the mid-sixteenth century the church was demolished and rebuilt as a joint undertaking: the Universitas paid for the naves, the rest the Chapter, two confraternities and a priest. The Ministry of Culture attests the town as “Loco Triviani”; Alfonso V of Aragon granted it in 1466 the autonomy of an Universitas, ratified by Bona Sforza in 1542. Then came a cloudburst in 1681, the pictorial cycle by Nicolò De Filippis, a pupil of Paolo De Matteis, in 1746, and between 1907 and 1913 the near demolition of the sixteenth-century façade, of which the rose window was saved. The medieval church re-emerged with the excavations of 1982. Outside the old walls, at the crossroads, Santa Maria della Croce stands over a shrine with a Madonna and Child of Byzantine character; to it the municipality links a legend, that of a sick stranger from Lecce guided by a light and healed, from which the patronage would derive. Lama San Giorgio cuts through the Mesozoic limestones: the municipality notes there traces of settlements from the Neolithic to the nineteenth-century villas, woods of Macedonian oak and downy oak, cherry orchards and terraced almond groves.

Day 2 — Cellamare

No document, the municipality warns, fixes the date and the patron of the castle. The first fortified core is placed in the 13th century, with the first feudal lords after the bishops' jurisdiction; in 1544 Felice Della Marra restored it, as a slab says, because it was “VETVSTATE PENE COLLAPSA”, almost collapsed from age. From 1631 the Del Giudice were princes of Cellamare, and the Giudice-Caracciolo coat of arms is on the portal. The Ministry's record calls it “transformed into a residence in the 16th c.”; in the courtyard remain an oil mill, a mill, cellars and stables. The municipal page on traditions describes the animal-driven stone oil mills, able to handle 10-13 quintals of olives in eight hours, and oil-millers paid with the pomace; the “vignale” was worth two “aratri”. The mother church of Santa Maria Annunziata dates from 1854, as the epigraph naming Ferdinand II says; in the mother church a relic of Sant'Amatore donated by Domenico Del Giudice is kept. The civic clock tower, 20 metres high, was built by a master builder from Noicattaro with tuff from the Capurso quarries, mounted a clock by the Terribile brothers of Uscio and housed the excise office. The name of the town has at least seven explanations, which the municipality lists as hypotheses, from “Cella di Amore” to “Cielo e Mare”. A couple of kilometres away, on the old road to Casamassima, Cocevole preserves the traces of a Bronze Age settlement. The tower's master builder leads to Noicattaro.

Day 3 — Noicattaro

The day opens before the bell tower of the Collegiata di Santa Maria della Pace, which a document of a religious congregation says is 33 metres high and was declared a national monument in 1913; the Enciclopedia Italiana dates the mother church to the thirteenth century. The Ministry's record describes an almost circular core, with a moat of about 5 metres. The same record registers the duchy of the Carafa from 1601 to 1806. It was precisely an oil mill of the Carafa, from 1700, that was turned into a theatre in 1869, in via Carmine: the Ministry of Culture's page recalls that in 2010 the FAI donated to the municipality the preliminary restoration project and that in 2019 Matteo Garrone shot a scene of “Pinocchio” there, more than sixty years after the last performance. The detail that remains is the plague of Noja. The studies republished by the University of Foggia tell of the sanitary cordon ordered by the Intendant of Bari on 29 December 1815, the Tribunal's declaration of 9 January 1816, the plague hospital in the former Carmelite convent, the Pagano and Carmine districts barricaded, the letters disinfected with vinegar and smoke. During Holy Week, according to a private editorial website, the Confraternita della Passione, based in the church of the Madonna della Lama and founded in 1615 according to Curia records, carries the crociferi in procession, penitents with the cross and an iron chain at their ankles. The last day leads to a town that is two in one.

Day 4 — Adelfia

The 1929 Enciclopedia Italiana describes a bridge over the lama of Montrone, which separated two hamlets that had been rivals “for centuries”, Canneto and Montrone, merged in 1927; the Greek name was chosen as a wish for brotherhood. The Ministry's record explains the double landscape: Montrone on a small height, Canneto on the plain, with expansion outside the walls only after Unification. Among the feudal lords the record registers, among others, the Dottula (1390) and the De Nicolai (1719); it also registers the chapel of Santa Maria del Principio of 1086, while warning that the certain sources begin in the 12th century. Wikipedia adds that even today there are two patronal feasts, two mother churches and two cemeteries, and a stele near the town hall marks the old boundary; according to the same entry the Norman tower of Canneto, of 1147-1153, is 19 metres high, and in 1799 French troops killed 83 citizens of Montrone. After phylloxera, the Enciclopedia writes, the vineyards were renewed with American vines. On Corso Umberto I the war memorial, dated 19 June 1921 in the inscription, bears the signature of the architect Domenico Modugno; in November, according to Wikipedia, San Trifone is celebrated, depicted with a locust on his spear. The journey, in our proposal, ends here.

DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 18 defects corrected · not approved