
From the Swabian period, in which Frederick II made of Trani his fortified maritime outpost, until the fifteenth century, a century of absolute splendor in which Trani represented the most important maritime and mercantile center of the southern Adriatic (the city that gave the Maritime Statutes , long supported by the city of Venice, which was even given “in pledge” at the end of the century), Trani played an eminent role in the regional chessboard of powers and privileges.
Then it became the seat of the Royal Audience at the end of the 16th century, and since then (and until today) the “forensic city” par excellence.
This is the sea of monuments, the sea of powers.
But today, looking at the port of Trani, looking at it from left to right, it accounts for two less monumental realities, but equally important for defining the most complex contemporary imaginary, which makes the city (and the inhabitant) love this city:
the parade of beautiful fishing boats on the left, with intense colors and evocative names, and the expanse of pleasure boats on the right, these signals of an “inhabited” sea, of a functioning and equipped port, of a city that still looks towards the sea even without the burden of supremacy to be affirmed and defended.
Castle, Cathedral, Court, but also the twentieth century municipal villa, which leads back to the civic and bourgeois characters that constitute the cultural root of the modern city, are visible from the sea even better than from the earth, as if it were still waiting for visitors , arriving on boats or ships (and often it is so: many tourists in small and big yachts moor here to stock up on food or gasoline, perhaps on the Greek islands route, and instead of one day they stop two, three, and then maybe decide to rent a house on the harbor …).
CATHEDRAL

SWABIAN CASTLE

MONASTERY

Info e Ticket T. + 39 380 5272776 E. segreteriainformativa@festivaldeltangotrani.it