San Severo

The city's name was born of a mistake: the settlement was Castellum Sancti Severini, after the little church of Saint Severinus the abbot around which it formed in the eleventh century, on the flow of pilgrims heading for Monte Sant'Angelo, and the syncope of Latin squeezed it into Sansevero — so much so that no saint called Severus was venerated here before the end of the seventeenth century. The separated spelling, San Severo, was adopted by the comune only in 1931, at the request of the Ministry of the Interior: the same case as Sanremo.

The historic capital of the upper Tavoliere, it is the thirty-third comune in Italy by area and the ninth in Apulia, and it holds a record in the glass: its white was the first DOC in Apulia, recognised in 1968, and the underground cellars dug beneath the centre tell of centuries of wine. Above ground the town is baroque through and through: twin churches, bell towers and palaces that earned it the title of city of art. In the thirteenth century it rebelled against Frederick II, who punished it by pulling down its walls, and Giacomo da Lentini, the poet of the Sicilian school, worked here as a notary. The Festa del Soccorso in May is among the most pyrotechnic in Italy: the batteries explode along the streets as the saints pass, among crowds in yellow and red shirts. The Gargano and its beaches begin twenty minutes away.