Poggiorsini

The name records the founding family. The Orsini dukes of Gravina bought the rural estate in 1609 and turned it into a working settlement, raising the ducal palazzo and the parish church of Maria Santissima dei Sette Dolori between 1723 and 1727. Until 1957 the village was a frazione of Gravina, administered from outside its own borders even as the palazzo and church gave it the shape of a town; only in that year did it become an autonomous commune, and with 1,273 residents it remains the smallest in the metropolitan city.

The village sits on the Alta Murgia, fifty-five kilometers south of Bari, entirely inside the national park that carries the plateau's name. Three kilometers north, on the road between Gravina and Spinazzola, a fortress ruin stands on a Murgia outcrop above the old road that once linked the two towns, listed among the emperor's holdings and predating the town itself by centuries. The current parish church replaced the older building after the 1930 Vulture earthquake, so the settlement's oldest structure sits outside it, on the plateau, while the village center is largely a rebuilt one. What the estate's late founding and its small size add up to is a place whose civic history is short and legible: bought, built, and only recently let govern itself, set inside a landscape far older than any of its buildings.