The Gargano is shaped like a spur pushing out into the Adriatic: a block of limestone rising to a thousand metres, covered with beech woods, with centuries-old olive trees at its heart, and a coast made up largely of white cliffs. Since the fifth century pilgrims have crossed it to reach the cave where, according to tradition, the Archangel Michael appeared; today that sanctuary is a World Heritage Site.
The journey begins on the gulf. Manfredonia is a town founded by King Manfred, son of Frederick II, on 23 April 1256 to rehouse the people of Siponto, which the earthquake of 1223 and the surrounding marshes had made uninhabitable. The castle on the seafront was begun under Manfred, completed by the Angevins and remodelled by the Aragonese; since 1980 it has housed the National Archaeological Museum, home to the largest existing collection of Daunian stelae, funerary slabs carved between the seventh and sixth centuries BC by a people who lived here before the Romans. Three kilometres away, in the archaeological park of Siponto, stands the Romanesque church of Santa Maria Maggiore, consecrated in 1117, with its columned crypt. Beside it, over the remains of the early Christian basilica, Edoardo Tresoldi's wire-mesh structure has risen since 12 March 2016: fourteen metres high and about seven tonnes of galvanised wire that redraw the vanished naves in mid-air. In the Middle Ages pilgrims sailed from this harbour for the Holy Land.
Sixteen kilometres of hairpin bends lead up to eight hundred metres and a town with a view over the whole gulf. Here, between 490 and 493, the Archangel Michael is said to have appeared three times to Lorenzo Maiorano, bishop of Siponto, asking him to consecrate a natural cave to Christian worship. The cave has been a place of pilgrimage ever since, and the Lombards made it the national sanctuary of their kingdom. In June 2011 UNESCO inscribed it in the serial site "Longobards in Italy, Places of Power", together with six other monuments. A stone staircase leads into the cave; the main feast days fall on 8 May and 29 September. Around the sanctuary the town keeps the castle begun by Robert Guiscard, enlarged by the Swabians and used as a prison by the Angevins, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore with its portal carved in 1198, and the baptistery of San Giovanni in Tumba, dating from the twelfth century, which everyone calls the Tomb of Rotari because of an old copying error. The town is also the seat of the Gargano National Park authority.
The road west follows the same line as the medieval pilgrims, the Via Micaelica, which climbed from the Benevento area to the Gargano by way of the friaries of Stignano and San Matteo. San Giovanni Rotondo was a farming village until, on 28 July 1916, a Capuchin friar from Pietrelcina arrived: Padre Pio, who stayed until his death on 23 September 1968. John Paul II canonised him on 16 June 2002. Around the old friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie has grown one of the most visited shrines in Italy: the church designed by Renzo Piano, with its great arches of Apricena stone, was consecrated on 1 July 2004 after ten years of work, and the saint's body rests in the crypt. A visit to the shrine is worthwhile even for those who are still searching for faith.
From San Giovanni Rotondo the route turns back east and climbs towards the forest that fills the centre of the promontory, at about eight hundred metres. The name comes from the shade: the beeches here grow tall and dense, and in some valleys they have never been felled. That is why, in 2017, part of the Foresta Umbra joined the list of UNESCO sites of Europe's ancient beech forests. The State has protected it since 1977 as a biogenetic reserve, with a strict core where entry is forbidden. The visitor centre, next to the small Umbra lake, has a modest natural history museum and an enclosure where you can watch fallow deer; the surrounding woods are home to the Italian roe deer, which keeps on the Gargano one of the last original populations left in Italy, with Castelporziano and the Orsomarso mountains. From the car park start the trails marked out by the former State Forestry Corps, fourteen in all, for walks lasting from an hour to a whole day. In October the beeches change colour and the wood becomes a place of solitude.
The passage from the forest to the coast is thirty kilometres: from beeches to Aleppo pines, from shade to the light of the sea. Vieste sits on a rocky point at the eastern tip of the Gargano. The medieval centre is a maze of climbing alleys and white houses; at the top stands the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, from the second half of the eleventh century, with three naves divided by twelve columns whose capitals are original, and just beyond it the castle rebuilt by Frederick II in the thirteenth century, now a military site closed to visitors. On the beach south of the town rises the Pizzomunno, a monolith of white limestone twenty-five metres high. Legend says it is a young fisherman turned to stone by grief for his beloved Cristalda; Max Gazzè dedicated a song to him and took it to the Sanremo festival in 2018. Facing the harbour, on the islet of Santa Eufemia, the octagonal lighthouse of 1867 marks the entrance to the waters of the promontory.
The twenty-two kilometres of coast road between Vieste and Peschici are the finest stretch of the Gargano shoreline. Every cove has its trabucco: a platform of Aleppo pine poles driven into the rocks, with long booms holding a net that is lowered and raised with winches. The system is documented on the Gargano from the eighteenth century and allowed fishing without putting to sea when the weather ruled it out. Along this stretch there are sixteen of them, some still working, others turned into restaurants. Peschici comes at the end, on a white spur sheer above the water: it was founded in 970 by Slavic settlers led by Sueripolo, sent by the emperor Otto I to free the Gargano from the Saracens. Below the sixteenth-century tower of Monte Pucci stands the most photographed trabucco on the coast, and inland the abbey of Santa Maria di Calena, founded in 872 by the emperor Louis II, remains one of the oldest Benedictine monasteries in Puglia.
The return south passes through Vieste again and follows the road along the cliffs to Mattinata. Fifteen kilometres from the town, the Baia delle Zagare with its two white limestone sea stacks is the postcard of the Gargano. Above the bay, on Monte Saraceno, a panoramic path crosses a Daunian necropolis with more than five hundred tombs cut into the rock. Mattinata lives above all on olive oil. The plain between the mountains and the sea is covered with centuries-old olive groves that are monuments in their own right, and the local variety gives a medium-fruity oil with notes of almond, recognised as Dauno Gargano PDO. The harvest is done by hand in October and November, the best time to visit the mills. On Monte Sacro, above the town, the abbey of the Santissima Trinità, dating from 1058, closes the circle of Gargano monasteries with which the journey opened.
Two hundred kilometres to go from a cave hollowed out of limestone to a timeless beech forest, and from there to a coast of pine poles planted on the rocks. The Gargano is best seen in four or five days, and staying at a farm stay between Vieste, Peschici and Mattinata is the best choice.
