Grottaglie means the caves: from the Latin Kriptalys and the Greek kryptá. It is not a figure of speech — the centre is dug into the tufa, and the town sits among the gravine, the canyons that cut the Murgia. In the gravina del Fullonese, almost a kilometre long and forty metres deep, there are cave dwellings on several levels, three rock churches and a great cistern that was part of a system for gathering and storing water. And one of those churches, dedicated to Peter and Paul, is called San Pietro dei Giudei, Saint Peter of the Jews: here settled Jews who had escaped the massacre and the burning of Oria in 977.
The ceramics quarter is unique in Italy: dozens of workshops dug into the gravine, where the potters have for centuries turned the capasoni — the giant wine jars — and the figures of the crib. To walk among the kilns and the yards cluttered with terracotta is to step into a living trade. Above the workshops stands the Episcopio castle, which the archbishop of Taranto had built at the end of the fourteenth century along with the walls and the mother church, and which for centuries was the sign of the feudal power of the Taranto bishops: the inner tower is nearly thirty metres high, and the bishops lived inside it. Today, where the stables were, is the ceramics museum. In the mother church is kept the most precious piece of sacred Grottaglie, a polychrome stone crib by Stefano da Putignano of 1530. The Fantiano quarries have become an open-air theatre, and all round the gravine carve out the landscape of the table-grape vineyards. In December the crib exhibition draws collectors from all over the south.
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📅 Every year, on 31 January
Grottaglie celebrates Saint Cyrus on 31 January, in a town almost entirely carved into the tufa along the sides of its ravines, famous for centuries for its ceramic production.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
