Puglia historical timeline

Origins

Three Italic peoples held the region — Daunians, Peucetians and Messapians — before Greek colonists arrived. Taras, now Taranto, was founded around 706 BC by settlers from Sparta, the only colony Sparta ever established, and became one of the wealthiest cities of Magna Graecia. Its coinage and its bronzes are the strength of the archaeological museum there today.

Rome took the region in the 3rd century BC and ran two roads to it: the Via Appia and later the Via Traiana, both ending at Brindisi, the port for Greece and the East. That made Puglia Rome's doorway to the eastern Mediterranean, and Brindisi is where Virgil died returning from Greece in 19 BC.

Byzantines, Normans and Frederick II

After Rome, Puglia was Byzantine for centuries — longer than almost anywhere in Italy — which left Greek-rite churches, a Greek-derived dialect still spoken in a few Salento villages (Griko), and a lasting orientation eastward.

The Normans took it in the 11th century, and in 1087 sailors from Bari stole the relics of St Nicholas from Myra in Asia Minor and brought them home; the basilica built to hold them still draws Orthodox pilgrims, and is one of the few churches used by both Catholic and Orthodox rites.

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily, treated Puglia as a favourite territory and covered it with castles, of which Castel del Monte (around 1240) is the strangest — octagonal throughout, with no moat, no stables and no clear defensive purpose.

Crusades, raids and empire

The ports served the Crusades as embarkation points. In 1480 an Ottoman fleet took Otranto and, by tradition, executed 800 townspeople who refused to convert; their bones are stacked behind glass in the cathedral. Spanish and then Bourbon rule followed, with the region governed as an agricultural periphery.

Modern Puglia

Unification brought little improvement and mass emigration followed, to the Americas and later to northern Italy. The 20th century added heavy industry — the Taranto steelworks, among Europe's largest, opened in 1965 and has dominated the city's economy and its environmental politics ever since.

In 1991 the freighter Vlora arrived at Bari carrying some twenty thousand Albanians, an image that defined a moment in Italian public life. Since the 1990s the region has become a major destination in its own right, and the restoration of the masserie and the trulli followed from that.

What is visible now

Greek foundations under Taranto, Roman columns marking the end of the Appian Way at Brindisi, Byzantine frescoes in rock churches, Norman cathedrals along the coast, Frederick's castles inland, and Baroque Lecce above all of it.