San Ferdinando di Puglia

This town was founded in 1847 as an agricultural colony, and everything about it had been decided in advance. The idea was the king's: Ferdinand II had passed through here in 1831 and had seen how the southern Tavoliere was faring. The plan, drawn up by the intendant of Capitanata, laid down that fifty families from the salt-pans of Barletta should settle here; that each should have a plot in emphyteusis, a farmhouse, two horses, a cart, tools, seed and plants; that a hundred measures of land should be common pasture for the oxen and sixty be planted with vines and fruit trees; and that the colony should have a church, a mill with an oven, two wells, a few houses of masonry and about a hundred straw huts. Those huts caught fire twice, and the fires tore the newborn community apart — and it is precisely them that the town put into its coat of arms.

The name came in 1848, from the holy king Ferdinand of Castile, patron of the sovereign who had founded the place; the «di Puglia» was added later, so as not to confuse it with the San Ferdinando in Calabria. On the square there is an octagonal clock tower whose mechanism is driven by a well underneath it, and on top there used to be a mechanical siren: it sounded every day at eight and at noon, and could be heard out in the open country thousands of metres away. It was taken down in 2012, and the one put back afterwards is much weaker. Of the churches, one is called the church of the Penny: the parish priest had it built with the offering the townspeople gave him week by week, and it took twenty years. The land here is among the least rained upon in Italy, and it gives peaches and artichokes: the town holds a national artichoke fair, and awards a golden artichoke to the best grower.