Celenza Valfortore

Celenza Valfortore stands on a rise in the Daunian mountains, above the lake of Occhito, and it has changed its name four times. Tradition has Diomedes found the first town, Celenna, which the Romans destroyed in 275 before Christ because it had sided with Pyrrhus: the story goes that the consul had its ruins sown with salt. The survivors gathered on today's hill and refounded the village as Celentia ad Valvam; under the Byzantines it became Celentia in Capitanata, in the sixteenth century Celenza valle Fortore, and only in 1862 did it take its present name. In that same sixteenth century the village chose the goddess Ceres as its emblem, and she is still on the arms with a cornucopia full of ears of wheat.

From the past there remain the baronial palace of 1467, with two battlemented towers, rebuilt by the Gambacorta — who lived there for three centuries and left their shield on two of the village's three gates — and the relics in the mother church: a fragment of the Cross set in rock crystal, a piece of Saint Stephen's femur, and the manna of Saint Nicholas, a phial of water taken from the saint's tomb in Bari. A monastery had been built in 1222 a thousand paces from the village to commemorate a visit by Francis of Assisi: of that, not a stone is left.