Gravina in Puglia

Gravina sits within the gravine, the network of limestone canyons cut across the Bari-Matera-Taranto karst plateau, the same geological system that produced Matera's Sassi 30 km west. This canyon is the deepest of them: 100m down, 350m wide at its narrowest, running straight through the centre of the modern town. The plateau above holds the current population of 42,703; the old town clings to the cliff edge, its houses stacked against the same rock that the canyon walls below carry as a run of rupestrian churches and sanctuaries hollowed straight from the stone.

The defining crossing of the two halves is the aqueduct bridge, built in the 18th century to bring water from the Murgia springs into the city and still walkable as a pedestrian route above the gorge floor. On the canyon walls below it: a sanctuary carved into the rock, a church reached by a vertical stair and cut entirely into the cliff face, and a crypt complex holding frescoes from the 10th to 12th centuries, Byzantine work surviving in the dark of the rupestrian chambers. Above, on the plateau, the medieval centro takes over: the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Romanesque and founded in 1092, holding its own Byzantine icon of the Madonna delle Grazie; the Castello Svevo rebuilt by Federico II; the Fondazione Ettore Pomarici Santomasi with its archaeological and Renaissance collections.

Gravina holds the Borghi più belli d'Italia designation together with Cittaslow, and lies on the Via Francigena, the branch tracing the old Via Appia route south, as well as bordering the Parco Nazionale dell'Alta Murgia, the karst plateau protected as national park immediately to the north. The food follows the same Murgia-Puglian line as the landscape: focaccia barese, orecchiette with cime di rapa, capocollo di Martina Franca, Primitivo di Manduria and the local Murgia DOC reds, built around the Festa di San Michele Arcangelo each September and the Carnevale Gravinese in late winter. What Gravina adds up to is a town whose deepest cut in the earth doubles as its main street: canyon below carrying the sacred and the ancient, plateau above carrying the civic and the everyday, the two halves joined by a bridge built for water and now crossed for its own sake.