Ginosa · Laterza · Castellaneta · Palagianello · TA
Four towns in the province of Taranto built on the rim of a gravina, those furrows in the rock that the Municipality of Palagianello describes as karst incisions deeper than they are wide. All four appear in the list of municipalities of the Parco naturale regionale Terra delle Gravine, published by the Ente Parco, and all four, by different routes and at different times, ended up in the diocese of Castellaneta: this is the second, less visible thread of this journey. The theme holds for each stop, but with different weight: of Palagianello and Ginosa the Ministry of Culture's records say a great deal, of Laterza the official sources we have read say little, and we say so. The grouping is ours. We propose it to those who want to read a town starting from the rock it stands on.
At a glance
Duration. 3 days.
The route
Day 1 — Ginosa, the two sides of the gravina
We begin at the edge: in Ginosa, writes the Ministry of Culture's record, the tuff walls of the gravina run around the town for more than ten kilometres. The reason for those walls is explained by the page of the Municipality of Palagianello, which we will meet again at the last stop: gravine form in soft calcarenite or in Cretaceous limestone, through chemical and mechanical erosion aided by tectonic movements, and took shape about a million years ago; where the deposits of the plain are thinner, the same origin produced instead the lame, wide and shallow. On the western side, south of the town, lies Rivolta: the ministerial record counts 66 cave houses on five levels, linked by paths, stairways and pedagne, with small squares called jazzi and hanging gardens; each house had a chimney, a stable, an underground oil mill and a cistern for rainwater, and in the walls niches, rings and mangers remain. The opposite side was devoted to worship: the record names the settlement of Santa Sofia and the church of Santa Barbara, with a vestibule and traces of frescoes, and other rock churches that the record lists. The portal italia.it recalls that Pasolini filmed here, for The Gospel According to Matthew of 1964, the earthquake that follows the death of Jesus.
Above the rock, italia.it describes a Norman castle overlooking the gravina, which it attributes to Robert Guiscard and to defence against Saracen raids, and a historic centre on the hill built only after the Middle Ages, with the Torre dell'Orologio and the 16th-century Chiesa Madre. Ginosa, says the Diocese of Castellaneta, belonged for centuries to the dioceses of Acerenza and then of Matera, and passed to Castellaneta only in 1976. The same fate befell the town of the next stop.
Day 2 — Laterza and Castellaneta
Laterza receives only a few lines here, because its municipal website could not be read. The portal italia.it gives its gravina a length of 12 km and a width of up to 500 metres, and places in the Palazzo Marchesale, which it dates to the 13th century, the Museo della Maiolica, opened in 2015: Laterza is for the portal one of the “capitals of Puglia maiolica”, white and blue. In the gravina the LIPU has managed since 1999 an oasis established in 1984, among steep walls and holm-oak woods; among the species it mentions the Egyptian vulture and the lesser kestrel, and among the animals also the wolf, the otter and Kotschy's gecko. Like Ginosa, the Diocese recalls, Laterza was joined to Castellaneta in 1976.
In Castellaneta the diocesan thread is tied. The episcopal see, according to the Diocese, was born at the end of the 11th century through the impetus of the Norman Riccardo Senescalco, nephew of Guiscard and lord of Mottola and Castellaneta; in July 1110, writes the Diocese, Mottola and Castellaneta had separate bishops. From 1226 the bishops disputed with the monks of Cava the rock churches of San Matteo and San Sabino. Of the cathedral the Diocese recounts the chapels opened by the confraternities in 1538 and 1643 and the white limestone façade of 1771, which erased the Romanesque-Gothic forms on the outside: the bell tower remains, small trefoil arches and two capitals carved with plant motifs, with a mask among the foliage. The gravina, writes italia.it, has a drop of almost 150 metres, and the portal reports that in the Middle Ages peasants sought refuge there from pirate raids. Rodolfo Valentino was born in the town in 1895: the museum dedicated to him, in the former monastery of Santa Chiara, opened on 18 June 2010, displays 35 posters and the reconstruction of the set of “The Son of the Sheik”; according to italia.it it opens Friday and Saturday, 10-12 and 17-20, and on Sunday morning. From 1818, adds the Diocese, the territory of the suppressed diocese of Mottola was joined to Castellaneta: and with it, Palagianello.
Day 3 — Palagianello, from the castle to the sanctuary
The last town is read from above. According to the Ministry of Culture's record, at the highest point stands the Castello Stella-Caracciolo, with corner towers and a moat, probably begun by the Domini Roberti, with a major intervention in the 18th century under the Caracciolo; the north-western tower remained unfinished. The same record reconstructs an intermittent history: a charter of 1421 calls it an ancient and uninhabited fief, a document of 1463 describes an inhabited hamlet; in the second half of the 15th century it became an Università thanks to the pragmatic sanctions of Ferrante I of Aragon, and the hamlet was populated in the first two decades of the 16th century. After the De Ribera, the Caracciolo held it until 1806; then Palagianello was a frazione of Palagiano from the beginning of the 19th century until 1908. A gate leads into the quadrangular square with the church of San Pietro Apostolo.
The Via Vecchio Santuario links the castle to the rock village, inhabited, according to the record, until the 1970s. The Municipality describes dozens of caves on several levels, freely accessible, and seven churches. In San Girolamo traces of 14th-15th-century frescoes coexist with sinopie probably never completed; Sant'Andrea, with frescoes from the 12th to the late 16th century, was damaged by the opening of a tuff quarry; San Nicola was throughout the Middle Ages the funerary chapel of a family, and in one of its tombs a small hoard of 15th-century Venetian coins was found; the Iazzo Rivolta ended up as a shelter for livestock. Our route arrives at the Santuario della Madonna delle Grazie, where, writes the Municipality, a boulder kept inside recalls the collapse of the 1970s that made it necessary to restore the façade. Here the journey, in our proposal, ends.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 11 defects corrected · not approved