San Paolo di Civitate

Under the fields of this town lies a dead city. The Dauni founded Tiati here, which the Romans conquered and renamed Teanum Apulum, a municipium with an autonomy of its own; from here, in 207 before Christ, the consul Gaius Claudius Nero set out with two legions against Hasdrubal, come down into Italy to help his brother Hannibal and defeated and killed on the Metaurus. In imperial times Teanum took the name of Civitate, and in the eleventh century it became a bishop's seat. On the eighteenth of June 1053 the battle of Civitate was fought here: the Normans of Humphrey de Hauteville against the army that pope Leo IX had put together with Swabians, Italians and Lombards. The Normans won, and it was one of the days that decided who would command in the south.

Today's town, on the other hand, was founded by Albanians. Between 1560 and 1570 about sixty Albanian families left the territory of Civitate, by then at its end, and built on the nearby Liburni hills a new village, which took its name from the old chapel of San Paolo; the assent came on the seventeenth of June 1570, in 1573 the Albanians living at Torremaggiore moved in, and after 1581 the last inhabitants of Civitate arrived. It was called San Paolo dei Greci, for the Eastern rite celebrated there; today nobody here speaks Albanian any more. The earthquake of the thirtieth of July 1627 destroyed almost everything and left standing only the church of San Paolo and the baronial palace: in 1640 the lord Andrea Gonzaga rebuilt the town on a regular plan, with streets on straight axes. In 1751 the fief passed to Placido Imperiale, who with another colony of Albanians founded Poggio Imperiale just beside it. The present name comes from a royal decree of the twenty-sixth of October 1862, to distinguish it from the other San Paolos.