Castellana Grotte

Castellana Grotte sits on the south-eastern Murge, forty kilometers south of Bari and inland from Monopoli and Polignano. The town takes its name from the cave complex beneath it, reached in 1938 when a speleologist sent by the Italian Touring Club broke through a known sinkhole into the system running under the plateau. The white alabaster chamber at the far end followed two years later.

Above ground the town keeps a separate rhythm from what lies underneath it. The walled center sits organized around the cathedral square, its mother church raised on Romanesque foundations with a Norman tower pressed into service as a bell tower. On the hilltop above, the sanctuary built after the 1690 plague draws the January procession that carries the Madonna statue down from the Capuchin convent to that same mother church, tying the two sacred points of the town together once a year. The place works on two levels literally: a plateau town of stone alleys and church squares going about its own history, sitting on top of a cave system that has nothing to do with it except the name.