Triggiano

Triggiano is true Bari countryside, grown out of the vegetable plots and almond groves of the Conca di Bari; but before it was farmland, for centuries it was rock. The people lived in dwellings carved into the tufa, rather like Matera, and that way of living lasted almost into the twentieth century: the old cave houses later became cellars beneath the brick houses built above them. Nobody knows for certain where the name comes from, and that very uncertainty has left a curious mark on the town's coat of arms, which over the centuries has alternated the image of the emperor Trajan, because the via Traiana to Brindisi passed close by, with a drawing of three crossing roads, for the theory that the name comes from a crossroads.

In the fifteenth century the town opened up to a Greek-Albanian colony, drawn by the land the town's own council offered to anyone willing to settle it; soon after, the duchess of Bari, Bona Sforza, gave it a charter and handed the fief to the Pappacoda, princes of Squinzano, who held it for two centuries before passing it to the Filomarino and then the Brancaccio. In 1934 the fascist government detached from Triggiano its only stretch of coast, the hamlet of San Giorgio, and gave it to Bari: since then the town has had no access to the sea. In 1964 a factory of the Turin firm Superga arrived, making shoes and tyres, which employed nine hundred workers until it closed twenty-two years later. Old Bari and the seafront are still ten minutes away, Polignano and the coast twenty.