History of Ruvo di Puglia

Salvatore Fenicia, a prolific nineteenth-century polygraph, in his Monograph of Ruvo of Magna Graecia failed to infer its derivation, citing its cause in the frequent destructions of the city that would lead, in his opinion, to a case of etymological damnatio memoriae.

[9] Finally, Jatta in the introduction to his work also refuted the hypothesis of those who identified Rudiae, hometown of the Latin poet Quintus Ennius, with Ruvo since there are archaeological remains of his true homeland between Taranto and Brindisi.

[12] Thus, the first inhabitants of the Land of Bari with the root "Ρυ-" wanted to indicate the area or territory where the waters flowed violently and dragged the limestone rocks down to the Adriatic Sea.

[16] Some worked stone artifacts reveal the settlement of some populations in the Ruvian countryside as early as the Middle Paleolithic, while remains of Neolithic villages prove the presence of man since the sixth millennium B.C.

and they took control of the original Ruvestine settlement in the area of the road leading from the Pulo di Molfetta to Matera, establishing a village of huts (about 14,000 inhabitants in a perimeter of 900 meters)[18] about 15 kilometers from Ruvo.

[17] Evidence of this era is abundant and it is outlined as a village active in metal and stone working and trade, as can be inferred from a bronze axe found in Contrada Montedoro and some ornaments of the same material.

[17] The Peucetians therefore inherited the proto-urban settlement and founded Ruvo initially as a hilltop village where the municipal pine forest and the church of St. Michael the Archangel now stand.

some groups of settlers from Crete peacefully colonized the Peucetian village, overlapping and integrating with the already existing community, transforming it into an autonomous Greek city named Rhyps.

[13][21] Ruvo became a prosperous Greek city and its wealth was based on trade in oil and wine and a flourishing production of pottery, as evidenced by the vast necropolis in which tombs containing bronze, silver and gold objects have been found.

The necropolis played a major role in increasing the city's international reputation because of the thousands of Peucetian, Greek and Latin artifacts and the building of the ancient historical heritage forgotten until the early 20th century.

[21] Ruvo's importance in Roman times is testified by its role as a station on the Via Traiana and by an epigraph, now located in Piazza Menotti Garibaldi, dedicated to Emperor Gordian III, which reports the existence in the city of the college of augustals.

[15] In the first century A.D. one of the oldest Christian dioceses was established in Ruvo, according to tradition: legend has it that St. Peter passed through Ruvo twice in 44 and on the first time converted some local pagans while on the second time, fleeing Rome from the persecutions of Emperor Claudius, he reconverted the same faithful who had returned to paganism, leaving as the first bishop of the city and the Apulian region St. Cletus (future third pope), to keep the faith alive in the nascent Christian community.

[17] In imperial times Ruvo was surrounded by walls and later suffered a first decrease in territory, as around the 5th century the cities of Molfetta, Trani and Bisceglie were established, thus preventing contact with the sea.

However, the Count of Conversano, Tancredi, formed a coalition with other barons in the area rebelling against King Roger II of Sicily, who in 1129 reconquered all the revolting towns including Ruvo, the only one to put up a strenuous resistance due to its mighty walls.

In this era the fief of Ruvo was also traversed by St. Francis of Assisi, who invited the inhabitants to build a new church (in which the Observant Friars Minor would later settle) on the site of the ruins of an old temple of Basilian monks.

From 1266 to 1435, the city entered the Angevin era, when on September 29, 1269, Charles I of Anjou ceded the Ruvian countryside with its hamlets (about twenty, including the important Calentano and the flourishing Matine and Strappete) to Arnolfo de Colant.

With the death of King Andrew of Hungary in 1345, Ruvo found itself in the middle of the clash between the Angevins and the Hungarians for control of the Kingdom of Naples, and in 1350 it was again sacked and razed to the ground by Ruggiero Sanseverino after a very long resistance by the Ruvestines that lasted for a good two days.

In 1516 under Fabrizio the walls were rebuilt and re-solidified after the assault of Gonzalo de Córdoba: the towers were also rebuilt, this time equipped with loopholes and a circular plan, as can still be seen today, and the main city gate or Porta Noé was fortified, which was also equipped with a portcullis in case the gate was broken through, surmounted by the municipal coat of arms, a niche with stone statues of the three patron saints of Ruvo, St. Cletus, St. Blaise and St. Roch, and the above-mentioned Latin inscription.

[34] However, while for almost two centuries Ruvo experienced a period of peace, the repercussions of the settlement of the new lineage weighed directly on the population and economy caught in the greedy and suffocating grip of the Carafa family, who took to appointing municipal administrators, turned the Pilota tower into a prison for opponents, hired henchmen to keep social tensions quelled, used the last remaining noble families in town to exert pressure, and allowed the locati (herd owners) from Abruzzo to carry out transhumance in the Ruvian countryside.

[13] All of this led to disastrous consequences for the city that resulted in the reduction of the population, the bankruptcy of the municipal administration (forced to sell the Contrada Difesa in 1632 due to debts) and the transfer of landed property from the hands of the peasants to those of the clergy.

[39] Throughout the 1600s the population of Ruvo declined dramatically from 5816 inhabitants to 700, as it was torn apart by natural disasters such as the locust invasion of 1606, the snowfall with frost of 1616 (the consequences of which weighed on the Ruvian economy for the next ten years), the drought of 1622,[40] the earthquakes of 1626 and 1627, and the plague of 1656.

[17] Important figures in Ruvo's history lived in this era, such as Antonio Avitaja (1621-1678),[41] a man of letters, playwright, mayor in 1646 and founder of the Accademia degli Incogniti,[42] Orazio Rocca (1674-1742),[43] a magistrate and benefactor persecuted by the Carafa family, and above all Domenico Cotugno, a physician, anatomist and surgeon, discoverer of the causes of sciatica and the functioning of the inner ear ducts.

Carafa, having seen his hometown Andria burn in the conflict between Sanfedists and the French, despite having supported republican ideals by favoring the action of General Broussier, sought to avoid a similar fate for Ruvo.

During the period of the Republic he organized the National Guard in Ruvo and restored order in the city but this cost him the inclusion of his name among the state offenders and as many as ten years of exile when the Bourbons returned to the Kingdom of Naples.

[48] Having resumed his legal activities, in 1803 Jatta made agreements with the Carafa family, regarding the fate of the fiefdom, and with the Law of the Tavoliere he resolved the issues with the Abruzzese herd owners.

As early as 1817, a Carbonari cell called "Perfetta Fedeltà" was established in Ruvo with 162 members, including the aforementioned Tommaso Ferrieri Caputi, Vincenzo Cervone and Francesco Rubini, which promoted liberal and constitutional struggles.

[13] Despite the dissolution of the secret societies in 1821 by Ferdinand I, Ruvestine patriots continued their activities clandestinely in the homes of liberals Marino and Pasquale Cervone or in the church of the Madonna dell'Isola, which no longer exists.

The end of the war was followed by the frightening epidemic of Spanish flu, which also struck Ruvo causing a very high number of deaths, so much so that it was necessary to destroy the cinema Roma, made of wood, in order to build new coffins.

[63] Boccuzzi was falsely accused of design errors and therefore suspended, but engineer Sylos-Labini, called in to verify his incompetence, found nothing wrong rehabilitating him as a professional but not as an official at the behest of the regime.

[65] However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, in 1946, a year of tensions and uprisings, a bloody event was also recorded in Ruvo: on March 14, some militants of the local section of the PCI, during the contestation of the opening of the headquarters of the Common Man's Front, were victims of the explosion of a hand grenade, thrown by the qualunquist Giulio La Fortezza, which caused two deaths and twenty-nine injuries.