centro storico, collinare, difensivo, Mottola, Motula (denominazione storica, epoca medievale), Mutula (denominazione storica, epoca medievale)

On the hill of Mottola, human presence has been unbroken since prehistory, Iron Age bronzes attest to that. The medieval borgo that grew here still holds its whitewashed houses and small squares: Largo San Nicola, named for a convent built during the first Byzantine colonisation; Largo Chiesa Madre, which once contained a great cistern; and Largo Mater Domini.

The oldest monument is not medieval at all. A thirty-metre stretch of powerful Hellenistic walls, from the fourth century BC, remains visible, the probable circuit of a Greek settlement. In 1023, the Byzantine catapano Basilio Boioannes built a castellum here, part of a strategic consolidation of the Longobardia theme. Later centuries added a thirteenth-century mother church, a seventeenth-century clock tower, and a fifteenth-century arch, Arco Fanelli, linking two blocks. The churches of the Immaculate Conception, Carmine, and Rosario complete a dense, layered urban history.

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