centro storico, collinare, concentrico, Locorotondo

Locorotondo rises on a hilltop commanding the Val d’Itria, within the Murgia dei Trulli. Its historic centre is a compact, concentric settlement, its whitewashed low houses arrayed in rings along narrow lanes. The town’s form is defined by natural and artificial margins, with historic quarters and roadways shaping its south-easterly exposure. Here, residential, productive, artisanal and religious functions coexist.

First recorded as “locus qui dicitur Rotundus” in a 1195 privilege of Emperor Henry VI, it was then a vineyard and olive grove, with a rural nucleus around the pre-existing chapel of San Giorgio (1050), atop the hill. This chapel suggests Byzantine influence in southern Italy, which ended in the late eleventh century with the Normans. Locorotondo began as an abbey fief; its earliest inhabitants were those of a monastic estate. By the early thirteenth century, it remained a grange of Santo Stefano, a modest rural unit run by Benedictine monks under a prior.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.