Termoli

The old town of Termoli is an island disguised as a headland: inside the walls, yellow and pink alleys run down to the Romanesque cathedral where San Basso lies, and the Swabian castle keeps watch. Below, the trabucchi reach their arms out into the Adriatic: during the last war those machines of wood and netting alone fed the town. And here runs the fifteenth meridian east, the central meridian of the Central European time zone: it is what sets the solar time of Berlin, Paris and Rome, and indeed they call it the hour of Termoli. Its crossing with the forty-second parallel falls on the beach of Rio Vivo, a few steps from where a trabucco stood, long since out of use.

In 1566 the Turkish fleet of Piyale Pasha came up the Adriatic coasts and arrived here. It found the town empty: the people of Termoli, warned in time, had gone off to the neighbouring villages taking their valuables with them. In their anger the Turks set the town alight, and everything burned, including much of the cathedral. Every fifteenth of August Termoli re-enacts it with the Burning of the Castle, a firework show. The other feast is the patron's, on the third and fourth of August: the image of San Basso is loaded onto a fishing boat drawn by lot and carried in procession by sea to the tower of Sinarca, where the bishop throws a wreath into the water for those lost at sea; then the saint comes back ashore and spends the night on show in the fish market. Until 1811 Termoli was not in Molise but in Capitanata, and it ended up here through one of Murat's reforms; and it was Ferdinand II, in 1847, who allowed the townspeople to build outside the walls. From here the ferries sail for the Tremiti, and the brodetto alla termolese closes the day as it should.