Grumo Appula

The first part of the name is of uncertain origin: some trace it to the Greek drùmon, the oak, some to the Latin grumum, a cluster of houses, some to a Messapian word that would mean the same as the Latin one. The addition of Appula is recent and has a practical reason: it dates from 1863, and serves to keep the town from being confused with Grumo Nevano. On the coat of arms there is an oak and, in the other half, three crescent moons that nobody can say for certain what they recall: the instinctive reading is the Arabs, who did hold Bari and its surroundings for some twenty years at the beginning of the eleventh century, but the crescent was on the standards of the Roman armies long before, and it was from them that the Arabs took it. With no reliable sources, the question stays open. Pliny, listing the peoples of what was then called Calabria, probably names the people of this place, the Grumbestini, next to those of Palo del Colle and of Bitonto.

In 1631 the fief was sold to the Spanish marquis Antonio Castellar for fifty-six thousand ducats: it was worth eighty-five thousand. Its freedom the town took later, when in 1800 it was declared a royal city. Two customs have to be told. The night between the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth of December is the bakers' night: teams of players and singers go round the streets with accordions and guitars and carry the Pastorale and the Christmas songs from house to house. And for the Madonna of Mellitto they build carts out of paper flowers, drawn by horses; the morning after the procession through the town, the statue and the carts go out to the hamlet of Mellitto, nine kilometres further on, with the faithful behind them. Sergio Rubini shot two of his films here.