Trinitapoli

Next door there was a city that asked to be moved, and was. Salapia, founded by Illyrian people who had crossed the Adriatic, stood on a small peninsula of the lagoon and was a city-state with a government of its own, a flourishing economy and its own coinage; after the battle of Cannae it allied with Hannibal, but six years later it opened its gates to the consul Marcellus and knew how to defend itself against those who wanted it back. Then came the wars, the burning by the praetor Cosconius and at last the water: the lagoon turned into a marsh that bred malaria. It was the citizens themselves who asked to leave, and Hostilius obtained the consent of the Roman Senate to move the city four miles further south-east, onto a small rise facing the lake: so was born Salapia Romana, which in time became Salpi. By the fourth century it was a bishop's seat, and the first Apulian bishop of whom we have certain notice is precisely Pardus of Salpi, attested in 314. Frederick II made it one of his loca solatiorum, the places of delight where he came to rest and to hunt, and had a palatium built nearby.

Trinitapoli, instead, was born from a field given away. On a plot donated by a well-off inhabitant of Salpi, one Moreliano, the Benedictine monks of the Trinità di Monte Sacro, on the Gargano, had a church built — the Ecclesia Sancte Trinitatis — and around it grew the Casale della Trinità. While Salpi emptied, the casale filled: with the shepherds of Abruzzo who brought their flocks to winter here along the drove roads, and with families of Schiavoni come from the Balkans, who in the second half of the fifteenth century obtained royal leave to settle. A watchtower defended it from the pirates; cracked by earthquakes, it was pulled down in the seventeen hundreds, but it has stayed in the arms, surmounted by a red banner with the cross of Malta — because from 1589 to 1798 the casale was a magistral commenda of the Knights of Malta. And in 1863, by now too big for its own name, the town asked Victor Emmanuel II to stop being Casal Trinità and to become Trinitapoli.