The gap beside Porta Venosina is recent: between 1909 and 1912, under mayor Attilio di Napoli, long stretches of the walls of Melfi were pulled down to connect the old town with the suburbs growing outside. The breach is still there and one of the town's main roads runs through it; the gate, on the other hand, stayed where it was, and it is the only one of Melfi's medieval gates to have survived in good condition.
What to see
The opening is a pointed archway resting on capitals shaped like upturned truncated pyramids, clamped between two cylindrical bastions with no openings at the base, so as to offer no weak spot. The base is splayed and meets the upper body through a convex horizontal moulding that marks the change of slope; a wall-walk runs along the top. The stone is the dark lava stone of the Vulture, cut into squared blocks: the same material as the whole circuit.
Above the arch sits a rectangular slab of the Aragonese period, half worn away and now unreadable, flanked by two coats of arms, a griffin and a basilisk. Before it, in 1231, at the time of the Constitutions of Melfi, Frederick II had another one set into the wall, opening with «Vetustas me destruxit, Federicus me reparavit», age destroyed me, Frederick repaired me. Two small recesses also survive, which in all likelihood held sacred images.
Visiting
The gate stands on the southern side of the walls and was opened around 1080, when the Normans widened the defensive perimeter after building the new cathedral outside the old walls; the Templars settled on the square in front of it, and a straight axis, today's corso Garibaldi, still leads from there to the cathedral. Roger II partly rebuilt it in 1130, while the two cylindrical bastions arrived around 1460 with Giovanni II Caracciolo, then lord of the town, who adapted the walls to cannon. The earthquakes of 1694 and 1851, which wrecked the rest of Melfi, left it almost untouched.
Our editors' tip
Once through the gate, walk east along the walls, past the second bastion: it was on that stretch that in 1528 the mines of Pedro Navarro, in French service, opened the gap through which the army entered the town. The massacre that followed went down in history as the Bloody Easter, and the siege is re-enacted every year with the gate as one of the main settings.