Immersed in the splendid landscape of the Vulture Melfese, therefore the city of Melfi had a fairly particular wall in southern Italy. The inhabited area is still dominated by the majestic Norman-Swabian castle, built by the Normans and enlarged by Frederick II of Swabia, in whose rooms there is the "National Archaeological Museum of the Melfese Vulture Massimo Pallottino", which houses the important archaeological documentation found in the Vulture Melfese area. Having been characterized by the Byzantine presence, Vulture and Melfi also have extraordinary examples of rock churches such as those of Santa Margherita and Santa Lucia (13th century) dug out of the tuff, in addition to the splendid Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in the Swabian-Byzantine Gothic style, with coffered ceiling decorated in pure gold.
Those who choose to undertake an itinerary between the places of culture in Melfi, could be guided by the impressions of the English landscape painter and writer Edward Lear, who in the mid-nineteenth century defined the castle of Melfi "worthy of the best Poussin paintings".
From the top of its position, right on the top of the city of Vulture, it is considered one of the most important medieval castles in the South of Italy, embellished by the National Archaeological Museum of the Melfese Vulture "Massimo Pallottino".
The history of the manor is linked to the prominent figures that have followed one another over the years and centuries in Melfi: commissioned by Robert the Guiscard, enlarged by Frederick II, equipped with new towers by Charles I d'Anjou;, remodeled by the Caracciolo family and come on Doria. To see it almost emerges on the top of a hill, one cannot fail to share the opinion of those who consider it the best known castle in Basilicata and one of the largest in southern Italy. Immediately the ten towers, seven rectangular and three pentagonal, of the four entrances, three are Angevins, and one of them, open from Doria, leads to the village through a bridge, once a drawbridge. After passing the door, you enter the beautiful main courtyard, overlooked by the baronial palace and the noble chapel.
On the ground floor of the castle there is the National Archaeological Museum of Melfese, which houses the important archaeological documentation found in the area, while in the Clock tower you can appreciate the splendid Roman sarcophagus, found in 1856, also known as "Sarcophagus of Rapolla", because it was once kept in the square of the town of Vulture.
Certainly belonging to a high-ranking personage, it is a refined product of the second half of the second century from Asia Minor. On the cover is depicted the deceased lying down.
Surrounded entirely by ancient Norman walls with watchtowers, Melfi has a unique city wall in southern Italy which includes the enchanting Porta Venosina, in Gothic style and with a pointed portal with a fluted bull archivolt, supported by truncated pyramid capitals. It is the only one of the six entrances to the city that still exists along the walls and takes its name from the fact that it started from an artery that led to the Via Appia, then to Venosa.
The door is flanked by two cylindrical bastions of the '400, to strengthen defensive capabilities, and is embellished with two bas-reliefs that flank it, the one on the right depicting the coat of arms of Melfi, the other, on the left, that of the Caracciolo. The commemorative plaque of the ancient glory and grandeur of the city, commissioned by Frederick II, was replaced by that of Giovanni II Caracciolo still visible today.
Of the Norman building of the cathedral of Melfi built in 1153 only the bell tower remains, while the body of the building was almost entirely redone in the eighteenth century in Baroque style. Initially dedicated to Saint Peter and built by Robert the Guiscard, no trace remains of the original cathedral of Melfi. The contrast between the Norman style of the bell tower and that of the facade of the church is due to the remaking of the latter following the earthquake of 1694. White, is divided by a frame and both floors are crossed by pilasters with Corinthian capitals, while the white stone portal is decorated by two angels holding an oval frame.
With three naves, the gilded coffered ceiling that decorates the central nave is beautiful, with the main altar in fine marble at the bottom. Really valuable are also a shining carved wooden throne, a wooden choir from 1557, an organ and an eighteenth century pulpit.
The bell tower, with a square plan, is spread over three floors decorated with imposing lion heads in white stone and mullioned windows surrounded by polychrome friezes in dark and light lava, with the exception, on the top floor, of the use of white volcanic stones and blacks by Vulture that make up a mosaic.
Symbols of the religiosity of the city of Melfi those of Santa Margherita and Santa Lucia (XIII century) are two extraordinary examples of cave churches dug out of the tuff. The rock church of Santa Margherita houses valuable frescoes of saints depicted in the Byzantine and Catalan styles, the life and martyrdom of Santa Margherita and the well-known "Monito dei morti" which seems to portray Emperor Frederick II of Swabia with his family. In the rock church of Santa Lucia you can admire a fresco depicting the life and martyrdom of the Saint and a Madonna and Child Enthroned. Both sacred places can be visited by reservation.
The slopes of the Vulture are covered in the lower slopes by immense chestnut groves and the variety cultivated on site, the "Marroncino", and other peculiarity of Melfi and numerous other municipalities in the Vulture and Alto Bradano, are very sought after. grape, Aglianico, which, preferring the volcanic soils, abundant in the area, gives red wine of excellent quality.
The Vulture area is one of the most intimate and scenic places in the Lucanian land and the slopes of the volcano are covered with dense and luxuriant vegetation favored by the natural fertility of the land. Precisely among its forests, between 1861 and 1863, the protagonists of the phenomenon of post-unitary brigandage find refuge, which identifies its main development centers in the municipalities of Melfi, Rionero in Vulture, Atella, Rapolla.
In this verdant scenario, just over ten kilometers from Melfi, there are the two lakes of Monticchio, one larger, the other smaller and Regional Reserve. The two bodies of water rise right in the place of the Vulture crater, a now extinct volcano, and they reflect the splendid Benedictine Abbey of Saint Michael.
Built on the sides of the ancient crater, the abbey, together with the remains of the Saint Hippolytus complex, is the tangible testimony of the presence of monastic orders in the Vulture territory. The frescoes dating back to the mid-11th century do not escape the most attentive eyes.
The Abbey of Saint Michael is also home to the Vulture Natural History Museum which offers seven stages (the path of the Vulture man; the way of fauna; the way of flora; the way of gea; workshops and temporary exhibitions; habitats and collections; the cradle of the rare "Bramea" moth) of a path that goes from Atella's Homo Erectus to the present day, to the knowledge of the urban settlements of the area and the exploration of the plant and animal world.
Aglianico is a well-known red grape variety grown mainly in Basilicata, Campania, Puglia and Molise.
The use of the vine is predominant in the Monte Vulture area with the production centers covering the municipalities of the Melfese and the Upper Bradano. Another excellent production area of Aglianico is Cilento. Aglianico of Cilento is a DOC wine whose production is allowed in the province of Salerno.
It is one of the most appreciated and famous wines of southern Italy, defined by experts as Barolo del Sud. The vine has been introduced in recent years in California and Australia, given that it develops in mainly sunny climates. It is an ancient grape variety, probably originating in Greece and introduced in Italy around the VII-VI century BC. One of the many testimonies of its long history is the discovery of the remains of a Roman wine press in the area of Rionero in Vulture, province of Potenza. There are no certainties about the origins of the name, which could go back to the ancient city of Elea (Eleanico), on the Tyrrhenian coast of Campania, or be more simply a distortion of the Hellenic word. Historical-literary testimonies on the presence of this grape are found in Horace, who celebrated the qualities of his native Venosa and his excellent wine. Aglianico del Vulture, considered one of the best Italian red wines, is for now the only wine in the province of Potenza that obtained the DOCG mark on 30 November 2011 with the new name Aglianico del Vulture Superiore. The old Aglianico del Vulture remains as DOC, together with the Terre dell'Alta Val d'Agri, which obtained the mention on February 18, 1971.
Melfi celebrated the millennium of the city's fortification in 2018. A unique appointment, steeped in history, culture but above all of academic research. Already because there are many gaps still present and that do not allow you to have an objective view of what the past of the city is.
We tend, with good reason, to consider Melfi the city of Federico II. But Melfi has a history that is lost in the mists of time and that must stimulate the curiosity of both scholars and citizens. It is no coincidence that within the millennium a scientific committee was born chaired by Professor Fonseca and that over the months has attracted medievalists from all over Europe to finally put the complex reality of Melfi in a new light in the centuries of the Middle Ages. Among the scholars who are interested in the cause, there is Dr. Alessandro Panico, an intellectual and multifaceted figure who is carrying out a widespread study on Melfi and on the foundation of the walls. her precious report that deepens the birth of the city fortification in the Byzantine era, proposing a series of hypotheses that redesign the topography and therefore the history of Melfi.
"Research on the origins of the fortification of Melfi is receiving new impetus in recent months, thanks to the celebrations for the millennial of the castle operated by the imperial catapane Basilio Boioannes. One of the still unsolved problems is the identification of a founding date of the fortified city, whose anthropization in the medieval age certainly precedes the battle of Canne on 01 October 1019, the date from which historians (Houben, Fonseca, Panarelli and others) place the construction of the Byzantine defensive wall: a single large fortified line that ran on the Apennine hills from Melfi to the Adriatic, passing through Troia, Bovino, Fiorentino, Civitate sul Fortore and a significant number of minor castras. An indication of this is the chronicle of Amato di Montecassino (Ystoire de li Normant), which places a battle between the Lombards of Ismael and the Romans, prior to that of 1019, at the Vaccareccia village of "Melfi".
It is also known that the volcanic cone on which Melfi stands was frequented since the seventh century BC: the Daunia necropolis of Chiucchiari is proof of this, which probably went up to the current via Ronca Battista, as reported by Araneo citing the discovery of ancient tombs in the 1863, during the construction of the sewer network (Historical News of the City of Melfl). If, therefore, the entire eastern part of the hill was a burial place, the western part, higher and defensible, must have been an inhabited acropolis since ancient times.
Such was, in all probability, the perimeter of the Byzantine castrum around 1018, preserved by the Normans for the entire period of the Altavilla County until the birth of the Duchy with the papal synod of 1059. Only from this year can the new one be reasonably dated urban and architectural flourishing of the city, first operated by Roberto il Guiscardo and then by Ruggero Borsa, which resulted in the golden thirty years of the construction of the great cathedrals, basilicas and southern Romanesque abbeys, of which the episcopal complex of Melfi is an integral part of Salerno , San Nicola di Bari, Trani, Lecce, Bitonto, Troia, Ruvo, Acerenza, Sant'Ippolito and the SS. Trinità di Venosa, just to mention some of the most significant examples. Thus enlarged, in a perimeter very similar to the current one, Melfi found the Sicilian kings Altavilla "returning", starting from Roger II who had the bell tower of Noslo di Remerio built, completed in 1153 during the co-ordination of William the Malo.
This hypothesis of planimetric evolution in two major phases is reflected, if more clues prove, in urban, architectural and geomorphological elements made legible by the new potential of computer graphics. Just look at a three-dimensional plano-altimetric relief to notice, for example, that the road network of the western part with respect to the axis of the "Rua Grande" is much more widespread and articulated than the rest of the historic city and, consequently, the blocks are here much more fragmented. If you then go down into the cellars of the buildings overlooking the Rua Grande, along the axis that descends from Via del Tribunale to Via Bagno, passing through Via Vittorio Emanuele, Piazza Umberto and Via Nitti, it turns out that they develop in several levels , of which the most superficial are not excavated but built in "elevation": this proves that the ancient level of the road axis was much lower than the current one and, at one time, had to be a single large valley that cut the hill in two as a wrinkle, separating the equipped acropolis from the rest of the settlement. The same Cathedral complex was built in an extra-moenia area, like the two Franciscan monasteries still existing in the city (including the Poor Clares whose primeval origins would be useful), the one dedicated to San Benedetto on the initiative of Guglielmo da Vercelli and that of the Augustinians.
Plano-altimetric three-dimensional relief of the historic center of Melfi
The most surprising element that emerges from this reading of the urban footprint of the Byzantine castrum is its semi-radial distribution: an absolute unicum among the fortified cities. If, in fact, the integral radial model is common to many cases of medieval castle on relief and also characterizes other settlements acquired and modified by the Normans (above all Aversa: see Stefano Borsi, The Norman City, Libria, 2014), the fortification of Melfi, on the other hand, is characterized by a semi-radial system, with four longitudinal lines which replace the orthogonal scheme of the Roman centuriation for thistles and decumans of the plains. They converge in a single hole located downstream, which necessarily becomes the main access to the city: it is via San Lorenzo, vico Sant’Andrea, vico Neve / Gradelle and via Santa Lucia. These four rays, connected by small crossbars that follow the contour lines, the so-called "trasonne" of popular jargon, close perfectly in a point, now occupied by a civil building, where the market stalls must originally have been, from which the adjacent Templar church of "San Nicola della Piazza" takes its name. The two extreme rays also go towards the opposite gates of the first city wall: the south-western radio at Calcinaia, the north-eastern one at Troiana. Three, therefore, were probably the gates of the city in the Byzantine and also in the Proto-Norman age, at least until the conventional caesura date of 1059, if one includes the main one located at the confluence of the radial system, which we could call San Nicola .
The inhabited area is divided, with rationality and elegance, into four triangular quarters of equal size, arranged in a fan, for each of which it is possible to identify a reference church, located along the course of the radial axis: San Lorenzo, Sant ' Andrea, San Teodoro and Santa Lucia. It is also noted that the military defensive system set up by the Boioannes army provided for a wide range of respect, not built, located between the inhabited area and the walls, especially in the north-western crown between the Calcinaia and the Trojan gates, where the castle is set today. This area was probably reserved for defensive maneuvers and to protect homes from hostile launches from outside.
The city, in fact, was defended above all by the steep natural slopes of the volcanic cone, rather than by the built walls, so much so that Amato da Montecassino himself defined Melfi “Very strong for its walls, not because they are high, but because they are placed high ". If this defensive criterion was valid along the entire perimeter - and there is no reason to doubt it - then the Byzantine walls, in the stretch inside the current city, had to run much higher than the axis of via Nitti, where in the following era the enlargement was completed and the door of Santa Maria or del Bagno was built. To realize this, just look at how high the houses located upstream of via Nitti, between vico Pendino and vico San Nicola.
Finally, a note on the four churches of the Byzantine quarters: if San Nicola, Santa Lucia, San Teodoro and Sant'Andrea are certainly attributable to the Greek-Eastern cult (I note the stripping episode of the relics of Santa Lucia operated by Maniace in Syracuse in presence of Guglielmo Altavilla), the church of San Lorenzo seems an anomalous exception. In fact, it was a suffragan of the Benedictine abbey of St. Hippolytus of Monticchio and is dedicated to a saint of Roman Catholic, Benedictine and Ambrosian worship. It is also the only church with an octagonal plan and, above all, it is not facing east, unlike the others. All clues that suggest a church founded in the Norman era, perhaps in place of another Byzantine church that could have been further downstream, if the criterion of a neighborhood church along each radial direction of the Greco-Roman castrum holds true ".
