Ruvo di Puglia

Ruvo has been razed to the ground three times: by the Goths in the fifth century, by internal power struggles once the town fell within the county of Conversano, and finally on the twenty-second of February 1503, when the Spanish under Gonzalo de Córdoba defeated the French garrisoned there. From those very walls, shortly before, thirteen Italian knights had set out for Barletta for the famous challenge. Even its coat of arms bears the marks of a misunderstanding: it was believed the name Ruvo came from land of brambles, and so the town adopted a vase full of brambles as its emblem, later simplified into today's terracotta amphora; it was the lawyer and archaeologist Giovanni Jatta who proposed, without success, replacing it with the town's ancient Greek name, Rhyps, read on coins that had been found, as Taranto had done.

It was Jatta himself, in the nineteenth century, who won a lawsuit against the Carafa, counts of Ruvo for three centuries, and used the compensation to fund the excavations that brought to light the thousands of finds now kept in the museum that bears his name: among them the vase of Talos, the town's undisputed symbol. The First World War memorial, erected in 1921, met a curious fate: under fascism the statue of Victory was sold and melted down to make weapons, and only in 2009, thanks to a public subscription, was it recast and put back in its place. Today Ruvo, an operational base of the Alta Murgia park, is also known for its striking Holy Week rites, an intangible heritage of Italy.