Andria · Castel del Monte · Corato · Minervino Murge · Spinazzola · BT · BA
Four comuni between the Murgia and the Ofanto and a castle that is not a comune: Andria, Minervino Murge and Spinazzola are in the province of Barletta-Andria-Trani, Corato in that of Bari. The hypothesised thread, "castles and plateau", holds only in part. The full castle is Castel del Monte, in the territory of Andria; elsewhere the sources speak of four Norman donjons on the walls of Corato, of a castle turned into a town hall at Minervino, of a single surviving tower at Spinazzola. The plateau holds better: the Murgia that the castle dominates, whose towns Norman counts and then, at Minervino and Spinazzola, the Pignatelli held in fief, and which at Spinazzola the Ente Parco protects as a geosite. It is a journey for those who want to read stones and documents together, and accept a theme that does not close every circle.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Andria
You enter through Porta Sant'Andrea, which according to the ministry catalogue record is the only medieval gate of the walls still standing; of the rest of the walls, the record of the historic centre adds, only the line of the streets survives. The walls are born of a conquest: according to the Ministry the walls rose in the 11th century, fortified probably by the Norman count Pietro in view of the taking of Byzantine Trani, and Andria then passed from "locus" to fortified town. On the entablature an inscription has Frederick II speak to the people of Andria, "Andria fidelis nostri affixa medullis", with the date 1230; but the same record notes that the date, because of the similarity of the characters, seems to belong to the nineteenth-century restoration (the gate was restored in 1891) and that the epigraph perhaps recalls an older one, since destroyed. The cathedral rests, according to the Museo Diocesano, on a smaller Byzantine church that is today its crypt: there in the 12th century Countess Emma, wife of Riccardo II d'Altavilla, was buried, and there tradition, not a document, places the tombs of Yolande of Brienne and Isabella of England, wives of Frederick II. Partly destroyed in 1350 by the mercenaries of Louis of Hungary, the church received in 1438 the chapel of San Riccardo, commissioned by Francesco II del Balzo after the discovery of the saint's bones. All around, the ministry catalogue names the Palazzo Ducale, the Torre dell'Orologio and the Sant'Andrea quarter with its caves. The castle linked to Frederick's name stands outside the town: it is the destination of the next day.
Day 2 — Castel del Monte
According to italia.it the castle dominates, from the top of a hill, the landscape between the Murge and the Tavoliere. The UNESCO record describes a regular octagon around a courtyard, with an octagonal tower at each corner; the limestone exterior is intact, the interior marbles and mosaics are deteriorated or removed. Before the castle there was a monastery, from which it took its name: Hubert Houben, in Treccani's Federiciana, finds it attested in 1120 and cites a document of 1258 according to which the monks left because of the "tyrannical persecution" of Frederick II, perhaps linked to the building site. On 29 January 1240 the emperor, from Gubbio, ordered the "actractus" to be prepared for the castle "apud Sanctam Mariam de Monte"; on how far the construction had advanced by then, UNESCO and Houben do not agree. The singular detail is the water: according to Houben the rain was collected in "hanging cisterns" at the top of five towers, and the UNESCO record points to a bathing installation of Eastern inspiration. The function remains open: no document, writes Houben, attests that Frederick stayed there, and the astronomical and esoteric readings seem to him "too fanciful". Documented instead is its use as a prison: after 1266 Charles I of Anjou held Manfred's sons there until 1299. The State acquired it in 1876; it has been on the UNESCO list since 1996. The 2015 map-guide traced from here a route towards San Magno, in the territory of Corato: the direction of the next day.
Day 3 — Corato
The castle's valley links Corato to Andria on paper as well: according to the ministry's record of the historic centre, two decrees of 1968 and 1985 declared its considerable landscape interest in both comuni. The territory was inhabited long before the town: the record dates to the 14th century BC the first settlements of the countryside, of which the dolmen is a testimony, and places in the late Bronze Age the tumulus necropolis of San Magno. In the Norman period the walls were reinforced with four quadrangular donjons and the Chiesa Madre of Santa Maria Maggiore was built; under Roger II the geographer Idrisi praised Corato, and after the death of Frederick II the town remained loyal to Conradin. The seventeenth century changed the shape of the town: the built-up area went beyond the Norman walls, arranging itself in concentric rings, the earthquake of 1627 destroyed many buildings, the Chiesa Madre included, and the plague of 1656 caused heavy losses. The Museo della Città e del Territorio, in the former early-twentieth-century prison in via Trilussa, runs, according to the Ministry's page, from the Neolithic settlement of Torrepaone to the tumuli of San Magno and the milestones of the via Traiana, and displays the stones of the buildings that collapsed in 1922 in a hydrogeological disaster. On the register of the Città dell'Olio, Corato calls itself "city of the Olive Tree and of the Dolmen". The next day you climb towards the Ofanto.
Day 4 — Minervino Murge and Spinazzola
Minervino stands at 429 metres and, according to the ministry's record, dominates the Ofanto valley. The old borgo is a labyrinth of alleys and steps called "Scesciola", which italia.it describes as a maze of tufa and white façades. With the Normans the town was an episcopal see until the first decades of the nineteenth century. The one who reorganised the town was a feudal lord: in 1619 the fief was sold to Porzia Carafa, wife of Francesco Pignatelli, and passed to her son Marzio, who enlarged the castle, today the town hall, built the Palazzo del Sedile and had the Madonna del Sabato erected. That church, dated by the Ministry between 1640 and 1660, rises above Basilian caves of the 9th-10th century, where the monks had painted on the tufa a Virgin and Child, today almost destroyed.
Spinazzola, at 435 metres on the ridge between the basins of the Ofanto and the Bradano, was born according to the ministry's record between the 9th and 11th centuries; in 1057 Robert Guiscard took it, and of the castle of the medieval settlement a square tower remains. The sheep counted too: between the end of the fourteenth century and the fifteenth, with the Regia Dogana della Mena, the population grew, also thanks to the nearby Regio Tratturo Melfi-Castellaneta, and to the same Dogana the Ente Parco links the birth of the Murgia masserie. Here, according to Britannica, Antonio Pignatelli was born in 1615, Pope Innocent XII from 1691, who denounced nepotism. In the countryside the former bauxite mines are for the Ente Parco a geosite in an integral reserve: they are viewed from above, along an educational path, and going down to the bottom is forbidden; the status of guided visits should be checked before setting off. The territory of the Alta Murgia and the Premurge is the one that the Ente Parco announces was proclaimed a UNESCO Global Geopark on 9 September 2024 under the name MurGeopark.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 17 defects corrected · not approved