Foggia

• 1. Introduction

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  Foggia sits in the heart of a broad plain in southern Italy called the Tavoliere, a place so rich in grain that it earned the nickname "granary of Italy." On the 25th of June 2007, a temperature of 47 degrees Celsius was recorded there - the highest ever logged in Italy and among the highest ever measured anywhere in Europe. That single number says something about this city's extremes: a place of immense fertility and brutal heat, of deep medieval history and sudden, catastrophic destruction. How did a city whose very name may derive from the Latin word for pit - a reference to the pits where wheat was stored - become both a prized seat of Holy Roman Emperors and one of the most bombed cities in World War II? And how did it survive, repeatedly, and rebuild?

• 2. From Pit to Palace

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  Pope Paschal II mentioned a church called Sancta Maria de Focis in a papal bull issued in 1100, and that document is the first written record of the modern city's existence. Before that, the area had been marshland, largely unfit for settlement. Robert Guiscard, the Norman conqueror, ordered the wetlands drained toward the end of the 11th century, and the city began its first real period of growth. The city of Foggia was the seat of Henry, Count of Monte Sant'Angelo during those same late 11th century years. In the 12th century, William II of Sicily commissioned a cathedral and enlarged the settlement further. But the most famous chapter in Foggia's medieval life came in 1223, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had a palace built there. He chose Foggia so consistently as his residence that he gave it a title inscribed at the entrance to his imperial palace: "Regalis Sedes Inclita Imperialis" - the preferred seat of the Empire. His court in Foggia drew notable figures including the mathematician and scholar Michael Scot. Little of that palace survives today, but the Arco di Federico II - the arch of Frederick II - still stands in the city.

• 3. The Weight of Wheat

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  In 1447, King Alfonso V of Aragon erected a Custom Palace in Foggia specifically to tax the local sheep farmers. That single act of fiscal policy had lasting consequences. The tax burden accelerated a decline in the local economy and allowed the land to fall back into marshiness. The Custom Palace, known as the Palazzo Dogana, survived those troubled centuries and eventually became something else entirely: in July 2013, UNESCO designated it a "Messenger Monument of the Culture of Peace," recognizing its long role in cultural exchanges. By 1865, sheep farming had given way to agriculture as the backbone of the local economy. The Apulian aqueduct, completed in 1924, finally resolved the city's chronic shortage of water resources, completing the transformation that Robert Guiscard had started eight centuries earlier. Foggia's famous watermelons and tomatoes grew in those same fields that had once been grain pits. Food processing remains among the few significant industries in the city today.

• 4. A City Shaken

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  Foggia has been struck by major earthquakes in 1456, 1534, 1627, and 1731. The last of those four was the most destructive, obliterating one third of the city. The upper portion of the Cathedral of Santa Maria de Fovea - a church probably erected around 1179 and home to the patron saint known as the Madonna of the Seven Veils - had to be rebuilt in Baroque style after that earthquake. The lower portion of the cathedral remained Romanesque, giving the building its distinctive split character: two architectural eras stacked on top of each other. After the 1731 earthquake, the House of Bourbon took on the task of rebuilding much of the settlement and encouraged cereal agriculture in the surrounding region of Capitanata. The cathedral's dual layers of style are, in their own way, a record of those disasters written in stone.

• 5. The War's Worst Days

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  On the 22nd of July 1943, more than one hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses dropped bombs on Foggia. The city was chosen because of its strategically important airfields and marshalling yards. The attack killed 7,643 residents and injured over 700. Less than a month later, on the 19th of August 1943, 233 B-17s and B-24 Liberators returned and struck the marshalling yards again, killing another 9,581 people. After the armistice of Cassibile on the 8th of September 1943, German troops briefly occupied the city under Operation Achse. They abandoned Foggia on the 27th of September, and by the 1st of October British troops had taken control. General Montgomery then sent his British XIII Corps beyond the city in a two-division drive: the 78th Division, known as the Battle Axe division, moved along the coastal road toward Termoli, while the 1st Canadian Division pushed inland through the mountains. British V Corps followed to protect the west flank and rear. The German 1st parachute division had withdrawn to the Biferno River near Termoli. Operating from Foggia's captured airfields, the British launched Operation Devon and succeeded in driving Nazi forces out of Termoli. Those same Foggia airfields then served Allied fighter and bomber formations for the rest of the war, primarily from the American 15th Air Force but also the 12th Air Force, the Royal Air Force, and the South African Air Force. In recognition of all this, Foggia received the gold medal for Civil and Military value in both 1959 and 2006.

• 6. People and Connections

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  Nicola Sacco, the anarchist executed in the United States in 1927, was born in Foggia in 1891. The composer Umberto Giordano, who lived from 1867 to 1948, was also from the city, and his memory is honored in the town square. The journalist Mauro De Mauro, born in 1921, was assassinated by the mafia in 1970. Vladimir Luxuria, born in 1965, became a transgender Italian politician. Donato Coco, born in 1956, rose to become chief designer at Ferrari. Tony Slydini, born in 1900 and a celebrated magician who died in 1991, also came from Foggia. The television character Archie Bunker in the American series All in the Family spent time in Foggia while in the Army Air Corps; the show's creator Norman Lear was himself stationed there during World War II. Luigi Samele, born in 1987, went on to compete as an Olympic sabre fencer, and in February 2019 Foggia hosted the European Cadet and Junior Fencing Championships - a sign that the city's relationship with the sport runs deeper than one athlete.