Monte Sant'Angelo

Tradition tells that it all began with a lost bull, found kneeling inside a cave nobody could reach; the man who loosed an arrow at it saw the arrow come back and strike him, was badly shaken and went to tell the bishop of Siponto. On the eighth of May 490 the archangel Michael appeared to the bishop and ordered him not to build, but to dedicate that grotto to Christian worship in his name. The town itself would grow up around the year one thousand, five centuries later. In the seventh century the Lombards, who were deeply devoted to Saint Michael, raised the grotto to be their national sanctuary, and it is for this that in 2011 the sanctuary entered the UNESCO list among the places of Lombard power. Pilgrims came by a branch of the via Francigena; sacked by the Saracens in 871, from the second half of the eleventh century the cave became an obligatory stop for crusaders bound for the Holy Land. The bronze doors of the portal are of 1076.

The castle was begun by a bishop of Benevento between 837 and 838; Normans, Swabians and Angevins enlarged it and used it as a prison, and in the fifteenth century Francesco di Giorgio Martini had to fortify it again because firearms had arrived in the meantime. In February 1799 the French carried off from the sanctuary silver, gold and precious objects with twenty-four mules. The Junno quarter goes back to the sixth century: little terraced houses of a single storey, all white with lime, the arched door surmounted by one large window, narrow streets and low flights of steps. The comune has a second UNESCO site, the beech woods of the Foresta Umbra, so called because it is shady and dark, and its territory runs from the mountain to the sea: the plain of Macchia, on the gulf of Manfredonia, belongs to it as well. The bread is baked in wood ovens in loaves that reach six kilos.