On the evening of 24 June 1945 several people accused of theft and some draft evaders were arrested at Minervino, and the town rose. It was not a protest of a few hours: the town was turned into a fortress, with machine guns placed at the key points from the Faro to the Castello and trenches dug on the main approach roads. Local memory says that Minervino had declared war on Italy. It took five days: on 29 June, after the attempt by senator Mauro Scoccimarro and the communist secretaries of Andria and Bari to calm things down, the carabinieri of half the province and the San Marco battalion arrived, and the situation subsided. The only victim was Michele Colia, and where he died they placed a memorial stone. It was not the first outburst: in 1898, driven by the conditions they lived in, the people of Minervino had killed three landowners, and the tumult had been repressed; and on 18 September 1943, at Murgetta Rossi, a unit of the Wehrmacht committed one of the worst crimes of the brief occupation of the Alta Murgia.
The Faro from which the machine guns started has a story of its own. It is the votive lighthouse of the public gardens, built in the fascist era and inaugurated in 1932 to commemorate the fascist fallen. Once the regime had fallen, many wanted to pull it down; instead it was decided to erase symbols and words, and on the pediment there remained the inscription to the martyrs of Apulia, without the adjective any more. The monument is the same one, the dedication is not. The town stands on the edge of the last limestone step overlooking the valley of the Ofanto, and for this they call it the balcony of Apulia. The name comes from Minerva: legend tells that some Roman legionaries who escaped the battle of Cannae took refuge up here, fell in love with the local shepherd girls and celebrated their weddings in a cave which they dedicated to the goddess — the same one that is today the grotto of San Michele. In the territory lies lake Locone, held back by the second largest earth-fill dam in Europe, begun in 1982: it irrigates the surrounding fields and supplies the Apulian aqueduct. In seventy years, meanwhile, the population has more than halved, having left above all for Turin.
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📅 Every year, on 29 September
On 29 September Minervino Murge celebrates co-patron Saint Michael the Archangel at the cave dedicated to him; the town's other patron, the Madonna del Sabato, is celebrated on the second Saturday after Easter.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Minervino Murge, but an easy day trip away.
