How Was Termoli Built

Termoli's old town is a single piece of defensive engineering with a cathedral inside it.

The walls

The circuit follows the edge of the promontory in brick and stone, rebuilt repeatedly after raids, with the sea on three sides and a single approach from the land. Everything inside is packed tight against that line.

The castle

The Castello Svevo is a square keep on a battered base with round corner turrets, rebuilt in 1247 on Norman work at Frederick II's order. It is plain, heavy and entirely military, and it sits at the most exposed point of the headland.

The cathedral

Santa Maria della Purificazione is Apulian Romanesque: a horizontally banded front with blind arcading, a carved portal with animals and figures, and a plain interior over a crypt. It went up over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was rebuilt after the 1566 raid.

The borgo lanes

The street plan inside the walls is medieval and defensive, deliberately narrow and confusing, with houses sharing walls and external staircases. A Rejecelle, at about forty centimetres at its tightest, is the extreme case.

Colour

The painted house fronts of the borgo are a recent convention rather than an old one, and they are what most photographs are actually of.

The lighthouse and the mole

The harbour arm and the light were built in the nineteenth century, and they are the reason the fishing fleet is here rather than at one of the river mouths.

Outside the walls

The modern town is nineteenth-century grid near the station and post-war blocks along the seafront, built fast for a resort season.