Conversano

In the year 1054 the Norman Geoffrey of Hauteville, a nephew of Robert Guiscard, made Conversano the heart of a vast county reaching as far as Lecce; and staying for months at his court was Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy and son of William the Conqueror, returning from the First Crusade. Robert married Sibylla, Geoffrey's daughter, here, and with her rich dowry redeemed the ten-thousand-ducat mortgage weighing on the duchy of Normandy itself. From 1455 the county passed to the Acquaviva d'Aragona, who held it until feudalism was abolished: among them Andrea Matteo, a patron of the arts and bibliophile, crossed his own Dutch mares with Oriental stallions to create the black, fast and sturdy Conversano horse breed. In 1774 one of those stallions was taken to Lipizza, in Slovenia, and became one of the founding sires of the Lipizzaner horse.

But the most famous count remains Giangirolamo II, known as the Guercio delle Puglie, a ruthless feudal lord and at the same time a great patron, who kept at his court for over twenty years the painter Paolo Finoglio, author of the canvases inspired by Jerusalem Delivered still in the castle. It was he who, to get around a viceroyal edict requiring the crown's permission to found new towns, had the houses of Alberobello built with dry-stone roofs, no mortar: a royal inspection on its way was enough, and the roofs were quickly taken down, then easily put back up. These are the trulli the whole world knows today. Conversano, on the first hills of the Murge seven kilometres from the Adriatic, only received the title of city in 2011.