Apricena

The stone of Apricena is quarried here and leaves for Germany, Japan and China; with it, and with the stone of Poggio Imperiale, the new church of padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo was put up. In one of these quarries, while the stone was being cut, a karst network came to light full of fossils — more than a hundred different species — and, along with them, of worked stone tools. The place is called Pirro Nord, the deposits go back more than a million years, with datings that do not agree among themselves, and those artefacts are held to be the oldest evidence of human presence in Europe: they bear out the idea that the genus Homo arrived here from the east, and not through the strait of Gibraltar as had been thought before.

Set into the clock tower is an inscription of the thirteenth century whose first line reads cena dat et aper nomen tibi Apricina. It tells us, that is, that the name comes from a dinner of wild boar, apri coena, which Frederick II is said to have had laid out here with meat hunted in the surrounding woods, deciding afterwards to have a residence of his built on the spot. Except that the place name is attested as early as 1156, in the form Precina, when the emperor had not yet been born; the true etymology remains obscure. The Capitanata earthquake of 1627 brought down nearly the whole town: nine hundred dead out of two thousand inhabitants. In the countryside stand the ruins of Castelpagano and those of the monastery of San Giovanni in Piano, where Celestine V took refuge after renouncing the papacy.