Noicattaro

The name Noicattaro is a nineteenth-century invention, and made of two pieces at that. Until 1862 the town was simply called Noja, but that name also belonged to a town in Basilicata, and to avoid confusion the people of Noja looked for a new one: they found it in oral tradition, which recalled an ancient, legendary land by the sea called Cattaro pugliese, and fused the two names together. Even today, though, local dialect says Nào, and the people still call themselves nojani. The village itself was born between the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a fortified settlement around a feudal tower, perhaps sheltering survivors of coastal settlements destroyed by Saracen raiders; its first lord was a Norman, a nephew of Robert Guiscard, and in 1592 the fief passed to the Carafa, who held the ducal title until feudalism was abolished.

On the twenty-third of November 1815 a gardener named Liborio Didonna died: he was the first victim of a bubonic plague outbreak that would go down in history as the last great one in all of western Europe. The town was isolated by digging a huge trench beyond its borders, and when the contagion ended almost eight hundred people had died out of five thousand. Perhaps under Spanish influence, over the centuries a tradition of Lenten penance and flagellation had meanwhile taken root, and it still lives on in Holy Week rites. Today the old centre revolves around the Chiesa Madre, Apulian Romanesque from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and around baroque buildings such as the churches of the Carmine and the Madonna della Lama.