Turi

The best known building in Turi was born to be a convent. Work began in 1850 to give the Poor Clares a new house, but in 1866, with the laws of the Kingdom of Italy that took monastic property into the state domain, the nuns never crossed the threshold: the building became first an institute for the physically and mentally disabled, then a house of detention, and was only finished towards the end of the century. There, between 1928 and 1933, Antonio Gramsci was shut up, and there he wrote the Prison Notebooks and the Letters from Prison; between 1930 and 1932 Sandro Pertini was held there too. Gramsci's cell has been kept with its original furnishing, and people go to see it.

The rest of the town sits on the Murgia and lives on cherries: a hundred thousand quintals a year of the Ferrovia variety, a sixth of the national crop, a cherry that is liked abroad partly because it is firm enough to stand the journey. Outside the built-up area, on the road to Rutigliano, is the cave where tradition has it that Saint Oronzo hid to escape persecution; in 1727 a chapel was built in front of it and then a church above it, and on the floor before the saint's altar a majolica from Laterza was laid, more than two hundred tiles. What is painted on them is not what you expect in a sanctuary: country landscapes and sea views, men and women, hares, foxes, dogs, a cat, a pilgrim. On the evening of the twenty-sixth of August the triumphal cart comes back into town drawn by six mules.