Sammichele di Bari

Today's village comes out of a failed repopulation. In the seventeenth century the Portuguese merchant Miguel Vaaz de Andrade, of Sephardic Jewish origin, baron of Casamassima and of San Michele, enlarged the old Torre Centuriona and on 20 December 1609 bought the fief of Casamassima from the treasury; to make his lands grow he gathered here four hundred and sixty Serbian refugees. Two years later they were expelled, because they secretly practised their Orthodox baptism. In 1617 the whole settlement was rebuilt under the name of Casale di San Michele. Not long after, the house of Vaaz fell into disgrace, suspected in its turn of crypto-Judaism, and in 1666 the new baron became Antonio De Ponte, whose arms stand on the entrance arch of the castle.

From hamlet to comune took another two centuries: San Michele became an autonomous comune in 1812, and in 1861, with the unification of Italy, it took the name of Sammichele di Bari. The village grew thanks to the main road from Bari to Taranto, the houses came out of the old borgo along the two axes, and in 1877 the clock tower was built. The Torre Centuriona, meanwhile, had become palazzo Caracciolo, a summer residence with sixteenth-century battlements; today it houses the museum of peasant life, with the tools, the clothes and the photographs of work in the fields in the nineteenth century. Along the old road to Taranto stand two menhirs, one a couple of metres high and the other little more than one. And then there is the zampina, the sausage that has made the village famous: its fair is held on the last weekend of September.