Mottola · Massafra · Crispiano · Statte · TA
Four municipalities in the province of Taranto that the Ente Parco lists among the fourteen of the Parco naturale regionale Terra delle Gravine, established by regional law no. 18 of 2005. The thread is the rock: according to the Ente Parco, gravine form in two ways, and the Ente Parco places the villages of Petruscio and of the Madonna della Scala in the cavities of one of the two forms. The second thread is historical and holds only for two stops: Mottola and Massafra were part of the same diocese, that of Mottola, when it was suppressed in 1818. The theme holds with different weights. Of Massafra the Municipality's records say a great deal, of Mottola a Ministry of Culture record speaks; for Crispiano we have mainly a tourist portal whose management is uncertain, and of Statte the sources say little, and we say so. The grouping is ours. It is a journey for those who want to see cave houses and rock churches and understand why they are there.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Mottola, Petruscio and Casalrotto
Mottola stands, writes the portal italia.it, on a height overlooking the Ionian, in a limestone amphitheatre immersed in the gravine. To understand the first of these it is worth starting from the geology of the Ente Parco: underneath lies the limestone of the Murge, deposited in the Cretaceous in a shallow sea, covered by more recent calcarenites and clays. Where water cut into the rock while the land was rising, the V-shaped gravine were born; where instead the calcarenite, along the interbeds, crumbled into sand, U-shaped valleys opened, with low, elongated cavities. It is in these that, at Petruscio, the Ente Parco places the rock villages.
The other pole is Casalrotto, along the SP 28. The Ministry of Culture's record counts about a hundred cave houses on the banks of a shallow lama, with a medieval necropolis only partly excavated; a 12th-century document calls the place Casalis Ruptus. Italo-Greek religious founded there between the 9th and 11th centuries the monastery of Sant'Angelo, and in 1081 Riccardo Senescalco donated the local monasteries to the Benedictine abbey of Cava dei Tirreni. The church of San Michele is on two superimposed levels: among the wall paintings appears the apostle Giacomo with the pilgrim's shell; on the lower level are five medieval tombs. From the mid-13th century the hamlet declined until it was abandoned, and in the 18th century the Caracciolo had the masseria built that still exists. Italia.it recalls that in 2015 Garrone made these caves the ogre's house in “Tale of Tales”. The same Riccardo Senescalco promoted, according to the Diocese of Castellaneta, the establishment of the diocese of Castellaneta: in 1099 bishop Amuri governed Mottola and Castellaneta together, and from 1110 the sees had separate bishops. When in 1818 the diocese of Mottola was suppressed and united with Castellaneta, its territory also included Massafra.
Day 2 — Massafra, the gravina of San Marco
In Massafra the gravina runs through the middle of the town. The Municipality describes a historic centre that grew around the castrum between two gravine, San Marco and Madonna della Scala, with the first dwellings, the “vicinanze”, dug into the tuff by subtraction: architecture in negative. The castle appears for the first time in a document of 970 kept at Montecassino; fortified in the Norman period, in the 16th century it was inhabited by the Pappacoda, who added bastions and walls, and it then passed to the Imperiali, whose eagle is carved next to the coat of arms of their predecessors. Today it houses the Biblioteca Comunale. Three viaducts span the gravina of San Marco; below, the village of Santa Marina, inhabited according to the Municipality from the 8th century to the end of the 19th century, preserves the house of the Igumeno and a church with three altars, the central one of Greek rite and the side ones of Latin rite. On the two sides, the Grotte Parlanti are reached from the via del Procaccia, an ancient consular road also used by the postal service to avoid the plain, often waterlogged.
In piazza Garibaldi the Chiesa Madre di San Lorenzo bears its dates carved: a capital of 1533 with the lion of the Pappacoda, the consecration of 11 February 1582 in the epigraph above the door; the restorations completed in 1996 brought to light, beneath the apse, an older rock church. The FAI describes the rock church of the Candelora, with three naves, with donkey-back, star, sail and domed vaults, and a fresco of the Presentation in the Temple from which it takes its name; a graffito there marks the year 1576. Italia.it recalls that Pasolini set the Capernaum of “The Gospel According to Matthew” in Massafra. The next day one goes down into the other gravina.
Day 3 — Massafra, the Madonna della Scala
The gravina of the Madonna della Scala, according to the Municipality, is almost four kilometres long and about forty metres deep; the central part, called the Valle delle Rose, hosts about six hundred varieties of plants. Here too, writes the Ente Parco, the villages lie in the interbed cavities of the U-shaped valleys. The Municipality counts more than two hundred clusters inhabited until the 12th century, with oil mills, stables, necropolises, pedagne cut into the rock and wooden bridges between the banks. The Grotta del Ciclope has yielded flint blades and Neo-Eneolithic pottery; in the Grotta del Mago Greguro a room called the “Farmacia” has about a hundred hollows that tradition links to the herbs of the magician and his daughter Margheritella. A Baroque stairway of 127 steps climbs to the sanctuary, built from 1729 and opened for worship in 1737 over an older chapel; on the high altar, a 12th-century icon, a dark-faced Hodegetria. Since 1776 the Madonna della Scala has been the principal patron. The journey then leaves the gravine for the masserie.
Day 4 — Crispiano and Statte
Crispiano, according to italia.it, lies on the eastern edge of the Park and counts about a hundred masserie built between the 15th and the 19th century; among the natural caves it points out the Grotta Stinge, with stalactites and stalagmites, and recalls the grave goods of a Magna Graecia tomb kept at the Museo archeologico nazionale di Taranto. The portal crispianoturismo.it, whose operator is not certain, describes the caves of the Vallone, inhabited from the 12th century, which divide the town in two, with the crypt of Santa Maria and its Greek inscriptions, and the Chiesa Vecchia, today the municipal Infopoint. The same portal places the rock settlement of Triglie partly in the territory of Statte, with fan-shaped galleries that intercept springs. Wikipedia dates Crispiano's autonomy from Taranto to 1919, and that of Statte to 1993.
In Statte the sources offer little. The Ente Parco places the gravina of Leucaspide among the V-shaped ones: the other form, the one cut by water. Near the masseria San Giovanni, on the border with Taranto, the Regione Puglia's record in the Ministry's catalogue describes the dolmen of San Giovanni: four slabs set upright and a capstone of about three metres by two, which the record attributes to the Middle Bronze Age, in the 2nd millennium BC, found already looted by Luigi Viola in 1884; in 1887 Janet Ross found a human jaw there. It is on private property and the record gives no opening hours. In 2022 the Municipality launched, and then concluded, a design competition for the recovery of the Canale della Zingara and of the access and viewing areas over the gravina in the town centre; the state of the works is not indicated. Here the journey, in our proposal, ends.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 12 defects corrected · not approved