Bari

Bari was a harbour of the Iapygian Peuceti before Rome absorbed it in the 3rd century BC, and its value lay where the coast road met the Via Traiana, with a port for trade to the east. After Rome fell it passed between Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards, served as one of the Mediterranean's major slave depots, and from 847 to 871 was the seat of an emirate before Louis II and a Byzantine fleet took it. It then became the capital of Byzantine rule in southern Italy, until Robert Guiscard captured it in 1071 after a three-year siege.

In 1087 Bari's sailors brought the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra, and the basilica raised over them was consecrated in 1197. Peter the Hermit preached the First Crusade here in 1095, and Pope Urban II held a council here in 1098 to try to reconcile the Eastern and Western churches. William I of Sicily destroyed much of the city in 1156. A long decline under the kings of Naples was broken by the Sforza dukes and above all by Bona Sforza, Queen of Poland, who settled here in 1556 in the principality she had inherited, and died in the city the next year.

Joachim Murat began the new grid-plan town in 1813, the Apulian Aqueduct brought running water in 1915, and the seafront was built in the 1930s. Bari surrendered without resistance in September 1943; on 2 December a German air raid hit the harbour, and the American ship John Harvey released a secret cargo of mustard gas, a disaster kept secret for years. In August 1991 the ship Vlora docked carrying more than 20,000 Albanians, and that October the Teatro Petruzzelli burned; it reopened in 2009.

Saint Nicholas defines the city. His basilica draws Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims from across Europe, and his feast is held twice: in May, marking the landing of the relics in 1087, with re-enactments, music, a fireworks contest and a procession that returns the statue to the basilica, and on 6 December, when masses begin early in the morning and the old town stays crowded all night. The Barese dialect, part of the upper-southern Italo-Romance family, is spoken beside Italian in daily life.

The theatre is a point of civic pride. The Petruzzelli, the fourth-largest theatre in Italy, opened in 1903 with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, and its destruction by arson in 1991 and long rebuilding were followed closely; it stages opera, ballet and concerts again. The Bari International Film Festival has run since 2010, Gianrico Carofiglio's crime novels and the television series Lolita Lobosco are set in the city, and the Fiera del Levante has made it a trade-fair city.

Football follows SSC Bari, founded in 1908, at Renzo Piano's Stadio San Nicola, built for the 1990 World Cup and host of the 1991 European Cup final. Bari Vecchia, once avoided at night, has become one of the city's main places to go out, with bars and restaurants around its squares open late.

Bari has about 316,000 residents (2026), the urban area about 750,000, and the Metropolitan City of Bari about 1.2 million. Immigrants make up about 6 per cent, with Georgia, Bangladesh, Albania, Romania and Pakistan the largest countries of birth.

It is one of the main economic centres of mainland southern Italy. Its economy rests on industry, commerce, services and administration, with services employing the largest share of workers, and the port is a cargo hub for south-east Europe as well as a ferry port for Greece and the Balkans. The University of Bari, the Polytechnic University, an academy of fine arts and a conservatory bring a large student population, and the airport handled more than six million passengers in 2023.

The city is divided into 17 neighbourhoods. Most people live not in the old town or the Murat grid but in the residential districts built around the centre in the 1960s and 1970s and the outer suburbs that grew in the 1990s. A third line of the metropolitan railway, to Bitritto, opened in January 2024. Evenings belong to the seafront and to Via Sparano's shops.

Bari's cooking rests on wheat, olive oil and wine. Orecchiette, called strasc'nat in the Bari dialect for the way the dough is dragged across the board, have been documented around the city since the 12th or 13th century, and along Via dell'Arco Basso women have traditionally shaped them by hand and sold them from tables outside their doors. The classic dressing is cime di rapa — turnip tops — with garlic, anchovies, chilli and olive oil, finished with cacioricotta.

Bari is also the home of spaghetti all'assassina, the "assassin's spaghetti": instead of being boiled, the pasta is cooked in a pan, traditionally cast iron, with diluted tomato sauce added a little at a time until it browns and crisps. It most probably reached restaurant menus in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and some trace it to a restaurant in the city centre. Tiella bakes potatoes, rice, onion and mussels together in the round earthenware dish that gives it its name.

Street food is fried and baked dough. Panzerotti, fried turnovers that look like small calzoni, are usually filled with tomato and mozzarella; focaccia pugliese has potato in the dough and is topped with tomatoes, olives and oregano. Pasta al forno, baked pasta with small meatballs and hard-boiled eggs, was the traditional Sunday dish, and taralli and sgagliozze, slices of fried polenta, are eaten in the old town.