Imperial Apulia

The farm is comfortably linked to the main cities nearby and with Bari’s airport.

In the “GIROTONDO” devised by us, we invite you to visit the macro-areas.

• IMPERIAL APULIA(within 45 km from our structure)

Wide horizons and strong colors, sometimes harsh and bleak.

This is how the Murgian landscape appears, that of Imperial Apulia, dominated by the presence of Frederick II and three cities of art with a glorious past: Barletta – Andria and Trani

• Trani – 12km

Cathedral on the sea and historic buildings

Swabian Castle

Jewish Quarter

Colonna Monastery and “Fortino sul Porto”

• Barletta – 30 km –

Norman Swabian Castle

Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the Colossus of Heraclius

Cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore

Cellar of the Challenge

Palazzo della Marra formerly the Giuseppe De Nittis Art Gallery

• Andria – 27 km –

Castel del Monte – UNESCO heritage

Church of Sant’Agostino

Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta

Sanctuary of Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Laure Basiliane

Confetto Museum

• Itinerary between salt flats and Archeology: Margherita di Savoia- San Ferdinando di Puglia- Canne della Battaglia- Canosa di Puglia ( tour around 30 km)

Margherita di Savoia

Salt pans and wetlands with thematic itineraries dedicated to the life of the salt pan and aquatic fauna (pink flamingos-Italian knights …)

Historical Museum of the Salt flat

San Ferdinando di Puglia

Civic museum

Canne della Battaglia

Bronze Age archaeological site and battlefield of Hannibal’s victory over the Romans (216 BC)

Canosa di Puglia

Cathedral of San Sabino

Tomb of Bohemond

Hypogea La Grasta

Roman bridge over the Ofanto

Roman domus of Montescupolo hill

• Itinerary of ancient ports, castles and….cardoncelli mushrooms: Bisceglie- Ruvo di Puglia- Castel del Monte – Parco Nazionale dell’Alta Murgia– Minervino Murge – Spinazzola (tour around 70 km)

Bisceglie

Cattedrale

Mura aragonesi – Torre dei normanni – Bastioni

Dolmen della Chianca

Grotte di Santa Croce

Casali (Giano- Pacciano- Sagina….) in Bisceglie’s country

Ruvo di Puglia

Cattedrale di santa Maria

Jatta palace and National archeologic museum

Talos

Holy Week: The rites open on the Friday of Passion, before Palm Sunday, with the procession of the Desolata. Holy Thursday is marked by the evocative nocturnal procession of the Eight Saints, while Good Friday is the turn of the mysteries. The procession of the Pietà on Holy Saturday closes the penitential rites, while on Easter Sunday the procession of the risen Jesus closes Holy Week

The forty-year-olds are female puppets hanging in the streets to depict the Lenten period, which are blown up on Easter morning

Castel del Monte  patrimonio UNESCO

Minervino Murge

Borgo antico e Grotta di San Michele

Parco Nazionale dell’Alta Murgia (*)

(*) NATIONAL PARK OF “ALTA MURGIA”

The park has an extension of 68,033 hectares. It extends in the highest part of the northwestern Murge plateau. It coincides with a part of the larger special protection area established to protect the grass steppe, habitat of the lesser kestrel (site of community importance). Among the main attractions of the park is Castel del Monte, one of the most famous castles in southern Italy and a world heritage site.

• The park features attractions of different types:The bauxite mines in Murgetta in the Spinazzola area;
  The Swabian castle of Gravina in Puglia;
  The herbarium museum of Ruvo di Puglia
  The Robinson municipal park with the annexed pine forest of Gravina in Puglia;
  The Galietti pine forest of Santeramo in Colle;
  The Mesola wood of Cassano delle Murge;
  The municipal pine forest Lagopetto di Grumo Appula
  the Mercadante forest in the territory of Cassano delle Murge and Altamura
  the cave of Lamalunga, a cavity that houses the Man of Altamura;
  the dinosaur quarry, in Altamura, where about four thousand dinosaur footprints were found in 1999;
  the Pulo di Altamura, representing the largest karst sinkhole in the area, about 6 kilometers north of the city of Altamura;
  the Pulicchio di Gravina, a very extensive karst sinkhole, 10 km from the town of Gravina in Puglia;
  the Grave di Faraualla, a deep sinkhole of karst origin in the territory of Gravina in Puglia;
  the archaeological park of Botromagno and Padre Eterno of Gravina in Puglia;
  the ravine of Gravina in Puglia: where the ravines of Basilicata and the Ionian arch of Taranto are born;
  the necropolis of San Magno in Corato;
  the cave of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Cassano delle Murge;
  particular are the jazzi, rock constructions used during the periods of transhumance, frequent above all in the territory of Andria, Gravina, Ruvo, Minervino and Spinazzola.

Flora:The vegetation of the Alta Murgia changes according to the area. This habitat is a succession of rock formations, dense forests and vast steppe expanses. In these rocky meadows we find trees typical of Mediterranean vegetation such as the common cypress, as well as more or less extensive areas of oak wood. In the woods of the Murgia today we find mostly examples of downy oak, fragno, thorny oak, holm oak, turkey oak and farnetto. On the other hand, low and medium grass species are very common, such as asphodel and ferula. The undergrowth is rich in plants such as honeysuckle, hawthorn, butcher’s broom, rockrose and myrtle. On the rocks it is easy to find caper plants, with their beautiful flowers, as well as aromatic plants such as the rosemary and oregano plants. In the park there are also plants or shrubs of food interest, such as asparagus, walnut, fig, almond, ramno, medlar, blackthorn, raspberry and wild blackberry. Numerous flowers such as clematis, cyclamen, dog rose, gigaro and rose of San Giovanni and peony. Among the fungal species we find the cardoncello mushroom and the gurnard, an edible mushroom with an intense yellow color, as well as numerous other inedible species.

Fauna:The national park is home to a good variety of fauna, especially small and medium-sized ones, which can find a fair range of foods in this singular and vast environment, characterized by the alternation of vast grassy expanses, rock formations, cultivated fields and dense forests. Another facilitating factor for the animals is the presence of numerous caves, ravines and rock formations, which offer them shelter. It should be noted the lack of watercourses, on the other hand, a bit typical of all of Puglia. In the past, the presence of wolves was known, generally coming from Abruzzo or from the nearest Lucania in search of flocks to feed themselves, which following the drastic increase in the number of wild boars have begun to reappear in the park as evidenced by the photographic documentation, the sightings and the various finds of the remains of animals such as sheep, foxes or wild boars preyed on by this hunter. Lately they seem to be stationed in the park, with a population still not well identifiable but which is in any case re-adapting to a habitat where there had been only sporadic sightings during the second half of the twentieth century. It seems that the wolves that are returning to reappear and hunt in the areas of Brindisi and Tarantino come precisely from the Murgia. (precisely in the areas of Ostuni and Martina Franca) Among the mammalian population there are the following species: weasels, stone martens, porcupines, hares, squirrels, small rodents (such as the dormouse, the dormouse, the oak mouse, the mustiolo, the Savi’s vole, the wild mouse), foxes and badgers. Among the reptiles we can include, in addition to the very common field lizard and the common tortoise, the presence of the green lizard, the Kotschy gecko and various snakes, including the viper, the cervone, the rat snake, the grass snake and, in particular, the snake leopard.
Amphibians are also present, although the arid environment would not suggest it. Alongside some more common species of anurans such as toads and frogs, the Apennine toad and a single urodel, the Italian newt, were found in a single site. On the other hand, there are numerous species of birds present in the park, some of great conservation importance such as the Little Bustard and the Occhione. Then there are various species of thrushes, blackbirds, the wheatear, the nightingale, the tawny owl, the serin, the robin but also corvids such as the imperial crow, the jackdaw and the hooded crow or the magpie. It is also possible to find the red woodpecker and the green woodpecker with some frequency. Various wild species of columbidae are sighted, such as the wild pigeon or the wild and collared dove. More nocturnal are the barn owl, the owl, the tawny owl, the long-eared owl and the owl. In addition, you can also observe the calender, the calandrella, the cappellaccia, the oriole, the wren, the blackcap, the tottavilla, the cesena, the strillozzo, the great tit, the blue tit, the marsh tit, the blackhammer, the song thrush, the blackbird, the finch, the bluethroat, and the lark. It is not very rare, in some periods, to come across pheasant, lark and quail. High in the sky of the rugged Murgia area you will encounter numerous falconids: the kestrel, the black kite, the lanner falcon and the peregrine falcon, the latter species similar in appearance to the lanner falcon. The lesser kestrel falcon, which has adapted to the urban environment to the point of nesting on Romanesque bell towers and on the tallest buildings of historic centers and, precisely for this reason, at high risk in this historical context) is very important number of “infiltrated” buzzards. More and more frequent is the presence of the great golden eagle, sighted in several areas of the park. More inland than its more typical ranges. Also present are the red kite, the biancone, the harrier, the marsh harrier and the lanner. You can meet the gray heron, which builds its nests starting from February. The rarely flooded areas of the park, moreover, host the stop of some migratory birds, such as the garganey and during periods of passage it is not rare to spot some storks.

MATERA (65 km) 

Known as the “City of Stones” and “Underground City”, it is known all over the world for the historic Sassi districts, which make Matera one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.

The city is located in the eastern part of Basilicata at 401 m asl, on the border with the south-western part of the metropolitan city of Bari (with the municipalities of Altamura, Gravina in Puglia and Santeramo in Colle) and the extreme north-western part in the province of Taranto (with the municipalities of Ginosa and Laterza). It rises right on the border between the Murge plateau to the east and the Bradanica pit to the west, crossed by the Bradano river. The course of this river is blocked by a dam, built in the late 1950s for irrigation purposes, and the artificial lake created by the dam, called Lake San Giuliano, is part of a regional nature reserve called the San Giuliano nature reserve.

The Gravina di Matera stream, a left tributary of the Bradano, flows into the deep natural pit that delimits the two ancient districts of the city: Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso. On the other side is the Murgia, protected by the Natural Historical Archaeological Park of the Rock Churches, more simply called the Murgia Materana park. The ancient districts called “Sassi”, together with the cisterns and the water collection systems, are the peculiar characteristic of Matera. These are ancient aggregates of houses dug into the limestone, close to a deep ravine, the “Gravina”. At the end of 1993, UNESCO declared the Sassi districts a world heritage site. In the countryside near Timmari there is also a newly formed mud volcano.

Matera is known precisely for the peculiarity and uniqueness of its historic center. Dug and built close to the Gravina di Matera, a deep gorge that divides the territory in two, the Sassi di Matera, districts that make up the ancient part of the city, extend into two valleys, which face east, slightly subject to the territories surrounding, separated from each other by the rocky spur of the Civita.

The Sasso Barisano, turned north-west on the edge of the cliff, if one takes as a reference the Civita, the fulcrum of the old city, is the richest in sculpted portals and friezes that hide its underground heart. The Sasso Caveoso, which instead faces south, located in a wider and shorter blade, vaguely takes the shape of a theatrical cavea. In the center, the Civita, a rocky spur that separates the two Sassi, on the top of which are the Cathedral and the noble palaces. Together they form the ancient urban core of Matera, declared a cultural landscape by UNESCO.

The Sassi di Matera are an urban settlement resulting from the various forms of civilization and anthropization that have occurred over time. From the prehistoric ones of the entrenched villages of the Neolithic period, to the habitat of the rock civilization (IX-XI century), which constitutes the urban substratum of the Sassi, with its neighborhoods, walkways, canalizations, cisterns; from the Norman-Swabian civitas (11th-13th century), with its fortifications, to the subsequent Renaissance expansions (15th-16th century) and Baroque urban arrangements (17th-18th century); and finally from the hygienic-social degradation of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century to the displacement ordered by national law in the fifties, up to the current recovery started starting from the law of 1986.

The cisterns and water collection systems

The choice of this site, although it guaranteed extreme safety to the town, caused its inhabitants enormous difficulties in water supply. In fact, the Sassi are located on a huge limestone bank about 150 meters from the level of the stream, while the clay hills that surround them to the west are too far away to ensure water supply in case of sieges.

Perpetuating a documented use since the Neolithic phases, the inhabitants have exploited the friability of the rock and the slopes to their advantage to create a complex system of canalization of the waters, conducted in a widespread network of cisterns and “divers”.

Seen from this perspective, Matera appears to be one of the oldest and best preserved examples of bio-architecture in the world.