How Was Bari Built

Bari is built of the pale limestone of its own plain, and it has three clearly separate pieces of town planning stacked against each other.

Apulian Romanesque

The Basilica di San Nicola, begun in 1087, effectively invented a regional style. It is a wide, plain, fortress-like block with a flat-topped facade between two towers, almost no sculpture on the mass of it, and the decoration concentrated around the doorway and along the arcaded flanks. Churches from Trani to Bitonto follow it. The cathedral of San Sabino is the same idea worked through a century later, with a famous wheel window on the east end.

The maze

Bari Vecchia is not laid out at all. Its lanes bend, narrow and dead-end, partly organic growth and partly deliberate — a defensive pattern that confuses anyone who does not live there. Houses open onto the street with outside stairs and shared courtyards, and daily life still happens in the lanes rather than behind doors.

The castle

Castello Svevo is Norman at its core, remodelled by Frederick II in the 1230s and given massive angled bastions in the sixteenth century against gunpowder. The three phases read clearly from outside.

The Murattiano

Murat's 1813 extension is the opposite of the old town in every respect: a strict rectangular grid of long straight streets and uniform blocks, oriented so that the sea wind runs down them.

The lungomare

The monumental seafront, largely built in the 1920s and 1930s, gave the city a formal face toward the water for the first time.