Canosa di Puglia

Looking out from the edge of the Murge over the Ofanto valley, on clear days as far as Monte Vulture, the Gargano and the Adriatic coast, Canosa was known as the little Rome, because it too stands on seven hills; legend gives it Diomedes as its founder. Its most famous day, however, was somebody else's defeat: after Cannae the Roman survivors took refuge here, and in the middle of town there survives the ruin of a house believed to be that of the matron Busa, the local noblewoman who took them in, while an arch bears the name of Gaius Terentius Varro, the consul who had lost that battle. Made a municipium and then a colony by Antoninus Pius, it received the via Traiana, an amphitheatre and an aqueduct paid for by Herodes Atticus; and the Roman bridge over the Ofanto went on carrying motor traffic until the nineteen-seventies.

Then it was the city of bishops, with saint Sabinus, and one of the Norman capitals of the South: in the castle, in 1089, the brothers Bohemond and Roger Borsa ended the rivalry opened by their father's death, and since 1111 Bohemond of Antioch has rested beside the cathedral, in a mausoleum where a slab of Greek marble reads simply BOAMVNDVS. Among its feudal lords were the Grimaldi, lords of Monaco: a connection for which Prince Albert II has come to Canosa twice. In 1643 town and castle were sold at auction, and the fortress fell so low that its stones were quarried for the baronial palace next door; the town bought it back in 1956, for six hundred thousand lire. Underground lie the hypogea of the Daunian princes, and in Palazzo Sinesi the grave goods of the Varrese tomb, more than four hundred pieces including an anatomical bronze cuirass, put back together after being split between the museums of Bari and Taranto.