The town has carried its name for a thousand years and it has nothing to do with friars: the Rotondo comes from a round baptistery of the old village, which tradition holds was first a place of worship of two-faced Janus and was later consecrated to saint John the Baptist. That little church is still called La Rotonda. In 1466 the fief, together with those of Monte Sant'Angelo and Trani, was given by Ferdinand I of Naples to George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, the hero of Albanian resistance against the Ottomans; and under the Bourbons the prices of goods sold across the Kingdom were fixed here.
Then came the friar. Pio of Pietrelcina lived in this town from 1916 until his death in 1968, and since then the profile of the place has been inseparable from his: the vast new church, the hospital he wanted and named the House for the Relief of Suffering, and a flow of pilgrims that nonetheless stops almost entirely around the friary, while the old centre remains an ordinary town. There is also a date remembered with less devotion: on the fourteenth of October 1920, the day the socialists who had won the elections took office, the dispute over hanging the red flag from the town hall balcony ended in bloodshed, with fourteen dead and eighty-five wounded. All around lies the Gargano National Park, and the sanctuary of Saint Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo is half an hour away.
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📅 Every year, on 24 June
San Giovanni Rotondo celebrates Saint John the Baptist on 24 June; the ancient church dedicated to him, known as «la Rotonda» and dating from the 6th-7th centuries, is the town's oldest religious building and gave it its name.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Giovanni Rotondo, but an easy day trip away.
