Massafra

Massafra is cut in two by gravine that are cathedrals of rock, and in their walls dozens of frescoed cave churches have earned it the title of the Thebaid of Italy, so many were the hermits and Byzantine monks. The sanctuary of the Madonna della Scala goes down into the ravine on a theatrical double ramp, and you reach it by a stair of 125 steps which, tradition says, cannot be counted: going down you get one number, coming up another. The devotion was born of the smallest thing: shepherds saw deer stopping again and again at the same spot, before a block of tufa on which a fresco of the Virgin had survived, the remains of a collapsed chapel. From there came the pilgrimages, and then the church, which as it stands today was opened for worship in 1731.

A little further on is another church born of an apparition, and there the story is more down to earth: the Virgin asked a shepherd girl to have a church built for her, the girl went to tell the bishop of Mottola, the bishop did not believe her, and was convinced only after a run of storms. About the town's name, on the other hand, historians have still not agreed. A twelfth-century Byzantine, John Kinnamos, calls it in Greek Masaura when recounting the Italian campaign of Manuel Komnenos; a recent hypothesis makes it Lombard, from Massa-fara, the fara being an administrative unit; but linguists object that after «Massa» an adjective or a specification is needed, as in Massa d'Albe. In 1080 the Norman lord of the place gave the abbey of Cava de' Tirreni a church with its monastery and a third of the fishing done each year in the river Patemisco. The castle looks down on the gravina di San Marco; the pharmacy of the wizard Greguro, the cave of medicinal herbs, adds mystery; and the carnival is among the liveliest in Apulia.