Mattinata

Mattinata is one of the youngest towns of the Gargano, and you can see it in how it was born: out of straw huts. The shepherds of Monte Sant'Angelo came down here to winter, where the climate is milder, and built themselves the pagghiére, low huts of dry limestone, almost always of a single room, with the stones laid in horizontal rings that narrow as they rise, the same technique as the trulli and the nuraghi. By the end of the eighteenth century those seasonal shelters had become houses, and the town was made. The old centre, in the lower part, is called Junno and is a miniature version of the Junno quarter of Monte Sant'Angelo: Mattinata is that city's daughter, and the dialect says so too. Palazzo Mantuano, begun in 1840 and today the town library, is the first building of any weight; the road to Monte Sant'Angelo was completed only around 1893; and an independent comune Mattinata became only shortly after 1950.

The name, however, is the oldest thing here. A couple of kilometres from the centre, in the Agnuli district, partly under water, lie the remains of Matinum, the Roman town that in Greek times was called Apeneste. There, tradition says, Archytas of Tarentum, philosopher, mathematician and general, died in a shipwreck, and it is Horace who remembers him in a famous ode: the measurer of the sea, of the earth and of the countless sands, covered by «a few handfuls of dust near the Matinian shore». Above the town, on monte Saraceno, is a Daunian necropolis of about five hundred tombs, dug between the eighth and the fourth century before Christ. The Gargano earthquake of 1893 did serious damage here and killed four people. Today Mattinata lives off the sea — white cliffs, faraglioni, the Baia delle Zagare — and off a richness you would not expect: sixty-one species of orchid grow in its territory, some of them nowhere else.