Before it was a town, Mola was a refuge: families gathered in the caves opening along the lame, the gullies that cut the coast at right angles, because they offered fresh water, hidden routes and shelter from pirate and raider attacks. In one of those caves, near the rural church of San Giovanni Battista, a wall painting bore the date 1020 until a few decades ago. The town proper was born only in 1277, when Charles I of Anjou refounded it and ordered a castle built to defend the coast, entrusting the work to the royal carpenters Pierre d'Angicourt and Jean da Toul. The stronghold withstood every attack for two centuries, until the Venetian siege of 1508 damaged it so badly that a complete rebuilding was needed: that gave it its present star-shaped polygon form, with sloped walls designed to resist firearms and a moat linked to the sea.
In the thirteenth-century Chiesa Matrice, a sixteenth-century fresco of the Dalmatian school recalls the siege of Curzola in 1571 by Uccialì, the Muslim governor of Algiers, and the crypt holds a reliquary with wooden fragments attributed to the True Cross, donated in 1713 and still carried in procession on Good Friday. The great focaccia trays remain an institution: until the early nineteen-nineties families brought their own half-metre doughs to bake in the public wood-fired ovens of via Nino Bixio. Today Mola's harbour supplies fresh fish to much of southern Italy, and the whitewashed houses of the old centre open onto piazza XX Settembre.
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📅 Every year, on the second Sunday of September
Mola di Bari celebrates Our Lady of Sorrows on the second Sunday of September; the town also holds a reliquary with wooden fragments traditionally attributed to the Cross of Christ, donated to the Chapter in 1713.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Mola di Bari, but an easy day trip away.
