centro storico, di pianura, costiero, Barletta, Bardulos (denominazione storica, prelatina), Barduli (denominazione storica), Baruli (denominazione storica, primo Medioevo), Barulum (denominazione storica, Medioevo), Varolum o Varletum (denominazione volgare), Varrétt (denominazione dialettale), Bàrolo (denominazione storica, cit. metà XIV secolo)

Atika: Barletta, Puglia

Barletta is a coastal town on the Apulian plain, its name a late echo of the Latin Bardulos recorded on the fourth-century Peutinger Map. The spot has been occupied since at least the fourth century BC, when a mixed settlement of dwellings and necropolises lined the road to Canusium. The medieval core preserves an architectural density that feels less like a tidy historic centre and more like a stone anthology of centuries. The Basilica of the Santo Sepolcro, founded in the eleventh century and rebuilt in Gothic-Burgundian style around 1300, is fronted by the famous ‘Colosso’, a fifth-century bronze statue locals call Eraclio. Near the sea, Frederick II’s square Swabian castle rises from an earlier Norman fort, reinforced with angular bastions in the 1530s. The cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, begun in the twelfth century and finished in the fourteenth, keeps company with the Gothic church of Sant’Andrea (its portal still thirteenth-century), the late-sixteenth-century Palazzo Della Marra, and the fifteenth-century Palazzo Del Leone.

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