Castelnuovo della Daunia

Its old name was Castrum Sclavorum, the castle of the Schiavoni: it was founded by Slavic groups who came from Illyria in three waves, in 642, in 871 and in 926, and who found here an Italo-Greek community and mixed with it. The village was born of that fusion. Between 1468 and 1476 a third people arrived, Albanian refugees fleeing the Turkish massacres: living together did not work, and once the first decades of the sixteenth century had passed the Albanians left to settle the neighbouring hamlet now called Casalvecchio di Puglia.

The centre does not look like the other villages of the Daunian hills: it has wide streets, a broad square and two open spaces that give air to the steep alleys and hold together the three quarters, la Villa, Piazza Plebiscito and Piano della Maddalena. The present name is a decision of the town council of the eighteenth of April 1863, taken so as not to be confused with all the other Castelnuovo that had just entered the same state. And in 1883 the town ran eight primary schools, four for boys and four for girls, with some four hundred pupils.