Celle di San Vito

Celle di San Vito sits at 726 meters in the Monti Dauni, the Subappennino chain on the Campania border, fifty kilometers west of Foggia. It is the smallest commune in Puglia by population, with 148 residents in the 2023 ISTAT count and falling. With its neighbor Faeto three kilometers up the ridge, Celle is one of two Franco-Provençal-speaking villages in southern Italy: the local dialect, Faetar-Cigliàje, descends from colonists settled in the Daunia by Charles I of Anjou after the Battle of Benevento in 1266 and is now spoken by fewer than 1,400 people worldwide.

Italian law 482 of 1999 recognises both villages as a linguistic minority. The cenobium that gave the village its name was founded by Benedictine monks as a summer cell on the mountain above; the modern commune lost its autonomy to the Barony of Val Maggiore in 1440 and only recovered it in the early nineteenth century with the abolition of feudal rights.