Piazza Umberto I

Melfi's main square spreads across the shoulder of the hill directly below its Norman castle, framed by the lanes of a walled town that once governed the Norman south. It carries a king of Italy's name, and it still does the job it has always done: gathering the city.

Why it matters

Melfi holds a place in Italian history out of proportion to its size. Under the Normans it was the capital of their southern kingdom, the setting for five church councils held between 1059 and 1137, and the town where, in 1089, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade. Frederick II treated the castle above the square as a summer residence and, in 1231, promulgated the Constitutions of Melfi there, a law code that reorganised the government of his kingdom. Piazza Umberto I is the public floor of that story: the paved gathering space of a walled hill town, where the everyday business of a Basilicatan city carries on beneath walls and towers raised for kings and councils.

What to notice

Read the square as the centre of a vertical town. Above it, the castle occupies the top of the hill, its ten towers — seven rectangular, three pentagonal — against the sky of the extinct Vulture volcano. The lanes that spill into the piazza belong to the medieval borgo: the heritage organisation FAI describes the historic centre as a small treasure ringed by Norman walls with watchtowers, spreading around the castle, with old palazzi, churches and quiet corners along the alleys. A short walk away stands the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, its Romanesque-Norman bell tower rising about fifty metres, beside the bishop's palace. Look, too, for the Porta Venosina, the last surviving gate in the walls.

Context and history

The town's political frame was set in the eleventh century. The Normans raised the castle around 1050 under William Iron Arm, on top of earlier Byzantine and Lombard structures, and in 1059 a church council convoked there by Pope Nicholas II recognised Robert Guiscard as duke of Puglia, Calabria and Sicily. Guiscard began the cathedral in 1076; its campanile followed in 1153 under Roger II. Councils met at Melfi five times down to 1137, and the third of them, in 1089, launched the First Crusade. Frederick II expanded the castle, hunted with falcons in the Vulture forests and issued the Liber Augustalis from the town in 1231. The Angevins reinforced the fortress and the Aragonese added polygonal towers; the Caracciolo and, from the 1530s, the Genoese Doria held the city. The earthquake of 1851 shook the castle badly, and restoration work began in earnest from the 1960s. Melfi also gave Italy the statesman Francesco Saverio Nitti, born here in 1868. The square now bearing the name of King Umberto I has sat through all of it as the town's meeting place.