Margherita di Savoia

Until 1879 this town was called Saline di Barletta, the saltworks of Barletta; then it took the name of a queen, Margherita of Savoy. Everything else here is the salt. The people who lived around lake Salpi were already gathering it from natural pools to barter it. What changed things was the arrival of the Illyrians, who had abandoned other saltworks on the Dalmatian shore after bloody wars — both Aristotle and Strabo speak of those — and who taught the local people not to gather salt but to cultivate it. The Roman itineraries name a city here, Salinis; towards the middle of the second century the emperor Trajan had a bridge built over the Ofanto joining Salinis to Bardulos, which is Barletta, and that bridge stood until it partly collapsed, around 1850. With Christianity the place became Sancta Maria de Salinis, and under that name it appears in a donation of Goffredo the Norman, count of Canne, in 1105; where that casale stood is not certain, and if it stood where they think it did, the sea has it now. The saltworks were called Salinae Cannarum, because they belonged to the bishop of Canne, who took the rent from them; a later bishop gave them to the Templars of Barletta; and the Templars lost them when Frederick II published the Constitutions of Melfi and made salt a monopoly.

The town suffered the earthquake and sea-flood of 1223 and was rebuilt by Charles II of Anjou in 1275, but what ruined it was slower: lake Salpi silted into marsh, malaria came, and the coast eroded — and it is eroding still. In 1294 Charles II annexed the territory of Canne, saltworks included, to Barletta; and between the end of the twelve hundreds and the beginning of the thirteen hundreds, as the climate worsened, many of the salt workers moved into Barletta. They did not stop working the salt: they went on going out to their fathers' dunes to do it. In Barletta they settled in the western part of the town, in the borgo San Giacomo — the one the people of Canne had founded after Robert Guiscard destroyed their own city — near the church where the Santissimo Salvatore was venerated; and when they came back, they brought him with them as their patron. Around 1540 the viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo, by order of Charles V, had towers built along this shore, and one of them, the Torre delle Saline, is still there with an old salt warehouse beside it, which today holds the museum. The pans are the largest in Europe and the second in the world; they are a state nature reserve and a wetland of international value under the Ramsar convention. The town lies squeezed between them and the sea, and it has the shape of that squeeze: a spindle about three kilometres long, on three main streets and a seafront.