For thirty years or so it was the only way into Melfi. The Calcinaia gate goes back to 1018, when the Byzantine catepan Basil Boioannes fortified the town to slot it into a chain of strongholds facing the Lombards, and it belonged to the first defensive ring, the one drawn tight around the original settlement. Then the Normans came: from 1041 the town spread out and the Balnea, Venosina and Sant'Antolino gates opened, all of them easier to reach. The Calcinaia, the only one perched on the ridge of the hill, slipped into second place and stayed there.
What to see
What you walk through today is not the Byzantine gate. Around 1460 Giovanni II Caracciolo had the walls reinforced with earth-filled bastions to take cannon fire, but the Byzantine stretch was left out of the work, judged impossible to storm: all that was added, a little to the right of the entrance, was a ravelin, that is a fortified tower. The gate came through the earthquake of 1694 almost untouched while the rest of the town was devastated, but its inner structure was left weakened, and in 1851 it collapsed together with the ravelin and the stretch of Byzantine wall.
Until then the archway ran parallel to the walls, as shown by Giò Pacichelli's engraving of 1600, the Canevaro map in the Doria archive of 1695 and Edward Lear's drawings of 1847. The building council that met at Melfi in that same year, 1851, decided to raise it again larger and set across the walls, and that is the position it still holds. The earthquake of 1930 took off its upper section, which only went back up with the works begun in 2018 for the town's millennium and finished, after pandemic delays, in July 2021.
Visiting
You come at it from the western stretch of the walls, the steepest one: of the five gates this is the only one on the ridge, and the climb is as much part of the monument as the arch. Look at the colour first. The squared blocks are dark lava stone, bound with a mortar of air lime and pozzolana, while the round arch is pale calcarenite, a material no other gate in Melfi uses and neither do the walls. Above it, the flat roof rests on three wooden lintels.
Our editors' tip
Take the outer road that drops towards the Balnea: that is where the suburb of kilns stood, firing bricks and building lime, and that is where the gate got its name. For once the place name honours no saint and no lord, it simply records the trade practised just outside the walls.