Terlizzi

Terlizzi has grown flowers for generations, and perhaps a poet emperor had already written it into the town's name. In 1230 Frederick II, fresh from victory over pope Gregory IX, wished to thank the towns that had backed him; for Terlizzi, besides easing its trade, he wrote a line in his own hand, Terlitium inter spinas lilium, a lily blooming among thorns. Before him, a Lombard lord had donated it in the eighth century to the abbey of Montecassino as a hamlet amid holm oaks and scrubland, and it is from there, terra ilicium, that the name most likely comes; but the emperor, playing on words, turned it into a flower.

Passed from the Sanseverino to the Orsini and then to the Grimaldi, princes of Monaco, the town grew tired of feudal servitude: in 1779 the citizens taxed themselves and paid ninety thousand ducats to the royal court to buy their freedom and become a crown town, borrowing the money from a Neapolitan baron. The debt was repaid over more than a century and a half of lawsuits and instalments, and was only settled in 1930. Since then, every summer, the streets of the centre see the Triumphal Cart go by, twenty-two metres of wood pushed by hand by four steersmen: legend has it that it began with a dispute between Terlizzi and Bitonto over a Marian icon found by a shepherd, settled by a duel between two oxen in which the one from Terlizzi gored its rival's eye out. Today's cart still carries, carved at its base, the two oxen, one with a bloodied eye.