Ascoli Satriano

In 279 before Christ, a short way from here, Pyrrhus king of Epirus beat the Romans, and it cost him so dear that from that day was born an expression we still use: a Pyrrhic victory. Plutarch tells that to a man congratulating him the king answered that another victory like that would ruin him. The city, though, had been here long before: it was founded by the Dauni, come by sea from the Illyrian shores, and on the coins minted here between the fourth and the third century before Christ the name Auhuscli appears in Greek letters, which the Latins turned into Ausculum and which is said to mean spring. Then came Sulla, who in the Giardino district planted a military colony for the veterans of the Legio Firma, and probably Horace passed this way too, during the journey towards Brindisi that he told in a satire. Until 1860 the town was called simply Ascoli.

The finest thing it has, however, came home only recently. In the nineteen-seventies clandestine diggers pulled out of these fields a trapezophoros of polychrome marble of the fourth century before Christ: two griffins with the body of a lion and the head of a dragon, a red crest and wings with blue feathers, tearing at a doe; it is about a metre and a half long. It passed through the hands of the dealer Giacomo Medici and of the international traffickers, and in 1985 the Getty Museum of Malibu bought it; after the investigation of the cultural heritage carabinieri and a long negotiation it came back to Italy in 2007, twenty-two years later, and is shown in the town's civic museum. The rest of the story is made of blows: the Saracens razed the city in the middle of the ninth century; in 1040 Ascoli rebelled against the Byzantines, killing the catapan Nikephoros Dokeianos, and on the fourth of May 1041 the battle of Montemaggiore, fought a few kilometres away, handed Apulia to the Normans; the earthquake of 1456 destroyed everything and the survivors moved to where the town now stands.