Lucera

The name may mean three things, and all three are fine ones: sacred wood, from the Etruscan luk-eri; or white wool, from the Greek leuka eria, because Horace and Martial praised the wool of the flocks here; or simply light. In 321 BC the Romans were beaten at the Caudine Forks while marching to relieve Luceria, and had to pass under the Samnite yoke; the following year the consul Papirius Cursor besieged the city and made the Samnites pass under the yoke in their turn. Then Luceria became a Latin colony with its own magistrates and the right to mint coins, housed Pompey's headquarters for two weeks, was given the Augustan amphitheatre that can still be seen, and received from Constantine a new name as well: Civitas Constantiniana.

But the story that has never closed in Lucera is another. From 1223 Frederick II moved the rebel Muslims of Sicily here, and the city turned Arab: a mosque, a Koranic school, freedom of worship and of trade, and on the hill the emperor's Palatium. The colony of Lugiarah stayed loyal to him and gave him archers, and it sheltered Manfredi, who had himself called sultan here; a pope proclaimed a crusade against them, and the Saracens fought for the Hohenstaufen until Manfredi's death. Then came the Angevins: the city held out through a long siege and surrendered from hunger in 1269. And in 1300, the year of the first Jubilee, Charles II of Anjou ordered it depopulated: from the fifteenth to the twenty-fourth of August the Saracens were in part killed, in part sold as slaves, in part forced to convert. With the walls and the mosque pulled down, the city was resettled with Christians and renamed Civitas Sanctae Mariae; the cathedral, among the few Angevin ones to survive intact, came straight afterwards. The patronal feast, i fist d'agust, falls on those same August days, and a procession of two hundred costumed figures re-enacts that very massacre each year. Below the belvederes, the Tavoliere spreads out like a sea of wheat.