The Torre Alemanna complex is 18 kilometres from Cerignola, along the provincial road to Candela, at the crossing of two important routes on the line of the sheep-tracks of transhumance. Today it is absorbed into the rural hamlet of Torre Alemanna-Borgo Libertà, founded in 1951 by the Agency for the Development of Irrigation and Land Transformation of Puglia and Lucania.
What to see
The name appears as a topographical reference in a document of the Codice diplomatico barlettano of 1334, which speaks of a «viam qua itur a Turri de Alamagnis»; in later documents the place is often cited as Torre de la Manna. The epithet Alemanna points to its founders, the Teutonic Knights, to whom Frederick II gave lands near Corneto, an old medieval village destroyed in 1349, whose remains lie a little over a kilometre away. It is considered by historians the most flourishing of the Teutonic bailiwicks in Puglia: between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it owned over two thousand eight hundred hectares of land and with its production also supported San Leonardo di Siponto, on which it depended. In 1483 the Knights ceded it to the Church, which made it a commandery run through procurators; in 1525 Leandro Alberti describes it as a goal of pilgrimages by former prisoners who brought ex-votos in honour of Saint Leonard, but already in a state of abandonment. In 1570 Cardinal Niccolò Caetani of Sermoneta began building the «Palazzo dell'Abate», in the south wing, and after the earthquake of 1731 the procurator Diego Ingellis built in 1750 the evocative loggia that links the palace to the tower.
Today Torre Alemanna is a farm complex with a square-plan watchtower, about ten metres on a side and twenty-four high, and buildings put up over the centuries for residential, productive and religious uses. The ground-floor room of the tower has a ribbed cross vault on four colonettes with Gothic crochet capitals, with fine frescoes on three sides and a triumphal arch on the west wall: it was long thought to be a pre-existing chapel, but it has been found to be the square presbytery of a church, probably Cistercian, and the excavations of 2003 revealed an even older apse. The frescoes, of the second half of the thirteenth century, were discovered in the first restorations, in 1989. Of the old quadrangle of the farm part of the buildings remains visible and well preserved; in 1983 the complex was placed under a preservation order as a monumental asset.
Visiting
Torre Alemanna is 18 kilometres from Cerignola, on the provincial road to Candela. According to the source the restoration under way is bringing it closer to becoming a Ceramics Museum and International Study Centre: opening hours and visiting arrangements are not reported and should be checked.
Our editors' tip
A short distance from the tower is Monte Maggiore, where in 1041 the battle of Montemaggiore took place, in which Normans and Lombards defeated the Byzantines.
