Vico del Gargano

Vico was called simply Vico until 1862, and they call it the village of love because its patron is San Valentino. How long he has been so is told by a document: when in 1678 archbishop Orsini described the mother church, he noted the altar of San Valentino, patron of Vico for sixty years already. Tradition has the town born much earlier, in 970, by the work of the legendary Slav condottiero Sueripolo, who in the service of the Byzantines — or of Otto I — is said to have driven the Saracen pirates out of the Gargano; his men settled near an Iron Age necropolis, on a height called Tabor, and mixed with the local people in a single fortified centre. The first document attesting a Castrum Vici, however, is of 1113, when the area lay in the Norman duchy of Apulia and Calabria, and the fortress was enlarged by Frederick II in 1240. In the feudal period the town belonged to the Caracciolo and the Spinelli.

The earthquake of 1646 did grave damage, above all to the Capuchin convent, and killed forty people. The eighteenth century brought instead the Accademia degli Eccitati, the birth of Michelangelo Manicone, the tree of liberty and the monumental cemetery of San Pietro extra moenia, one of the first in Europe. The nineteenth century lived on citrus: orange and lemon groves grown on terraces above the sea, a flourishing trade until the middle of the twentieth century and today in decline. After the Savoy annexation the territory was a den of brigand bands, whose base was the Foresta Umbra: that wood of beech and fir lies almost wholly here, for Vico is the heart of the Gargano national park and within a few kilometres it passes from sea level to the 782 metres of the heights. The Dominican convent, suppressed in September 1809 and half of it passed to the State, is today the town hall.