CASTEL DEL MONTE
Art gems
Medieval masterpieces are everywhere on the eastern coast, beginning with the inscrutable
Castel del Monte. We know the octagonal castle was built by Emperor Frederick II, one of the
most powerful men in the Middle Ages, in the early 13th century. But nobody quite knows why.
Isolated on a small hill, it lacks both the architecture and the location for a military fort, and it's
way too imposing to be a pleasure palace. The most evocative hypothesis is that it was an in-
tricate symbol, built around the magic intersection of astronomy, mathematics and the Christian
faith.
Traveling south, the Romanesque cathedrals at Trani and Otranto seem to rise from the sea. The
latter's floor is covered by a mosaic from 1165 representing the tree of life, a hopeful message in
the site of a massacre — a chapel houses the remains of the 800 citizens who were slaughtered in
the church where they had fled an assault by Islamic armies in 1481.
Puglia, like most of southern Italy, has been conquered over and over by northern and Mediterranean
armies since Greek colonizers established flourishing city-states on its coasts. More than 2,500 years
later, their heirs still speak Griko, a dialect of archaic Greek, in the inland Grecia Salentina.