Bitetto

Of its own name Bitetto has four explanations. The soberest: Bitectum, a Latin form from the age when the farmland here was divided into contrade — Babuctam, which is now Bavotta, Clausurae, which is now Chiusure, and Bitectum itself; that form recurs in official documents from the Middle Ages to the modern age. The second: Vitetum, land rich in vines — and the vine is on the comune's arms, and in dialect the word for vineyard, v'tet, sounds very like the name of the town, vetétte. The third is the most telling: Bis Tectum, twice the roof, that is a town rebuilt twice, or else a second roof for the people of Bari who fled here after the Saracens had destroyed their city. The fourth, perhaps Greek, is Beth Hetium, the arid village, and it would describe the place as it was: small farming clusters on ground with no springs and no standing water. Of a town, in the Roman age, there is no trace: in Horace's day Bitetto did not yet exist. What has been found is older and stranger — two intact block tombs of the fourth or third century before Christ, with Greek pottery in them, and, in May 1993, while foundations were being dug for some houses, a monolithic sarcophagus covered by a stone slab, with the dead man laid inside in the foetal position together with pebbles, small plates and lamps.

Bitetto took shape as a single village around a cenobium that the Basilian monks built in contrada San Marco, between here and Bitritto. Those monasteries were wanted by the Byzantines, and for a practical reason: through the monks' religious and political influence over the peasant families they could hold the territory better. When Robert Guiscard drove the Byzantines out of Bari, in 1071, the Basilians left, and the cenobium slowly became a heap of stones under the grass. The town's diocese can be dated by two papal bulls: one of 1025 does not name Bitetto among the suffragan sees of Bari, one of 1089 does — so it was founded between the two. The first bishop whose name is known, Raus, took part in the Third Lateran Council; the last died at the end of the seventeen hundreds, and in 1818 the see was incorporated into the archdiocese of Bari. What is left of it is the church, one of the finest pieces of Apulian Romanesque, raised in 1335: two stone lions holding up the columns of the central portal, a lunette with Christ and the twelve apostles, and New Testament scenes running round the frame. And inside that church lies the thing the town is known for: the body of the blessed Giacomo, a Franciscan lay brother born at Zadar around the year fourteen hundred and dead at Bitetto in 1496, which has remained intact through the centuries.