Gravina in Puglia, Metropolitan City of Bari, Apulia, Italy

🇮🇹 Gravina in Puglia is a town and comune of the Metropolitan City of Bari, Apulia, southern Italy.

The word gravina comes from the Latin grava or from the messapic graba, with the meaning of rock, shaft and erosion of bank river. Other words that share the same root are grava, gravaglione and gravinelle. Alternatively, when the emperor Frederick II went to Gravina, because of the large extension of the lands and for the presence of wheat, he decided to give to it the motto Grana dat et vina., that is to say It offers wheat and wine. Gravina is the home of the Alta Murgia National Park.

Tourist Industry • Gravina Cathedral (11th-12th centuries) - built by the Normans in Romanesque style. Destroyed by fires and earthquakes in the mid-15th century, it houses a splendid reliquary of an arm of the English Thomas Becket, obtained by Bishop Roberto in 1179. • The remains of Frederick II's castle, site on a hill nearby the town, originally a base for bird hunting. According to Giorgio Vasari, it was designed in 1231 by one Fuccio from Florence. • San Francesco - late 15th-early 16th-century church • Sant'Agostino - church with a simple white façade • Madonna delle Grazie- Baroque-style church with an unusual façade sporting a rose window surrounded by a large carved eagle, coat of arms of the Giustiniani. • San Sebastiano - Renaissance-style church with a nave and two aisles separated by pilasters. The cloister of the annexed convent has with Romanesque capitals decorated with animal and vegetable figures. • San Michele delle Grotte- 10th-century church carved out from the tuff rocks (one of the Chiese rupestri). It has also a well preserved Roman bridge, dating to at least 1686. Following the earthquake of 1722, the bridge was restored and transformed into an aqueduct by the Orsini family of Rome, who then moved to Gravina around the middle of the 18th century.