Castellaneta

Castellaneta sits on the Murge plateau, on the southern rim of the Gravina Grande, a karst canyon 10 kilometers long and 145 meters deep that wraps the town in near-vertical limestone walls. The municipal territory runs from the gravina down to the Ionian coast at Castellaneta Marina, fifteen kilometers south, where the long sand beach has held Bandiera Blu for ten consecutive years. The cathedral was founded under the Normans in the eleventh century, rebuilt in Romanesque form in the fourteenth, and given its white limestone facade in 1771.

The town is best known abroad as the birthplace of Rodolfo Valentino, born here on 6 May 1895 and reborn in Hollywood as Rudolph Valentino. A blue ceramic statue of the actor by Luigi Gheno was unveiled in the centro storico in 1961, captured in the documentary Mondo Cane, and the Museo Rodolfo Valentino opened on the 1995 centenary.