Bari is the city where I understood that a travel guide can get everything wrong while being right about every single stop. It gets it wrong if it puts them in the wrong order, and here the order depends on one fact alone: Monday closes the Swabian Castle and the Pinacoteca together, the two museum stops of the second day, while the churches stay open every day of the year.
Everything below follows from that. Day one stays inside Bari Vecchia and needs no calendar: the basilica of San Nicola, the cathedral of San Sabino with the Byzantine city buried beneath it, the four illuminated eleventh-century scrolls in the Diocesan Museum, the alley where the pasta makers roll orecchiette in the street. Day two leaves the old town for the castle, the picture gallery and the nineteenth-century grid.
The two days can be swapped, and further down I say when that is worth doing. All prices and opening hours are at the end, in one place, with the date I checked them.
Two days in Bari, and the Monday that sets the order
Bari is not a city you visit from a list, because almost everything worth seeing sits on a handkerchief of land: the old town is a peninsula between the old harbour and the new one, and you can walk from one end to the other in a quarter of an hour. Distances are not the problem. Closed doors are.
Here is the picture, and it is worth looking at before you book.
| Stop | Weekly closing | Ticket |
|---|---|---|
| Basilica of San Nicola | none | free |
| Cathedral of San Sabino | none | 7 euros for visitors |
| Museum of the Exultet | none | 4 euros |
| Swabian Castle and Gypsotheque | Monday | 6 euros |
| Pinacoteca Corrado Giaquinto | Monday | 5 euros |
| Bari Vecchia, piazza Mercantile, seafront | none | free |
The advantage over other Italian art cities is that here the dead day is a single one and both closures fall on it. In Turin the closures land on three different days and the itinerary has to be restitched each time; in Bari you only need to know that Monday is for churches and Tuesday for museums, and the trip works.
Day 1 · The basilica of San Nicola, where all of it began
Why does a guide to Bari begin in a basilica rather than at the sea? You start here because everything else in Bari, including the fact that Bari is an art city at all, follows from what happened on 9 May 1087, when sixty-two Bari sailors landed at the harbour with the bones of Saint Nicholas taken from Myra, in Lycia, today Turkey. It was not a pilgrimage: it was a raid, and the people of Bari have never much bothered to tell it otherwise.
The site opened in July of the same year, on the ground of the old Byzantine catapan’s residence, and moved so fast that on 1 October 1089 Pope Urban II was able to lay the relics in the crypt in person. The church above took a century: the consecration slab reads 1197.
What you see today is the prototype of Apulian Romanesque, and it makes more sense if you have already seen Trani or Ruvo, because both are its daughters. The façade is divided in three by pilaster strips, with two truncated towers at the sides, and it has no rose window: the light comes from the high windows, sparingly, and the interior stays dark even at midday in August.
Inside, three things are worth looking for. The ciborium over the high altar, the oldest in Puglia, four ancient marble columns holding an eight-sided pyramidal canopy. The cathedra of abbot Elia, a bishop’s throne of the late eleventh century carried by three crouching figures that look crushed by the weight, and the most argued-over sculpture in the Norman south. And the coffered ceiling, which is seventeenth-century and clashes on purpose: the panels painted by Carlo Rosa tell the saint’s life above an architecture five hundred years older.
The crypt is why people come. Twenty-six reused columns, every one different, and under the altar the tomb. One thing struck me more than the rest, and it is recent: in the side apse an Orthodox chapel was fitted out in 1966, with a second altar beside the Catholic one. It is a rare case, and not a symbolic gesture: Russian, Serbian, Greek and Romanian pilgrims really do come, and if you happen to be there on a day of Eastern liturgy you will hear Church Slavonic sung inside an Apulian Romanesque basilica.
I have written about the basilica at length in the basilica of San Nicola in Bari.
Day 1 · The cathedral of San Sabino and the city underneath it
Five minutes on foot, and you move from the saint’s church to the bishop’s. That is not a textbook distinction: in Bari the two institutions competed for centuries, and the cathedral was long the loser of the pair.
Its story begins with a catastrophe. In 1156 William the Bad ordered the destruction of the whole city, and the cathedral went down with everything else. What you see is the rebuilding that started straight afterwards, consecrated on 4 October 1292, and it reads as an adaptation of the San Nicola model: the same three-aisle plan, the same treatment of the galleries, but with a rose window on the front that San Nicola does not have.
The rose window is the first thing to look at, and it needs looking at closely. The splayed frame is covered in grotesque figures, monsters and heads that stick out, much of it restoration but on a medieval scheme. It was there to tell whoever came in that disorder stays outside.
Then there is the business of the light, and it is worth telling in full because it is usually told badly. On 21 June, around 5.10 in the afternoon, the sun comes through the rose window of the façade and casts on the floor a circle that lands on the thirteenth-century mosaic at the foot of the altar, commissioned by Archbishop Landolfo. The two roses coincide. You will read everywhere that the medieval builders designed it: what is documented is that the effect was noticed in June 2005 by the sacristan Michele Cassano, and that it follows from the orientation of the building, an orientation common to many European Romanesque churches of the same period. That it is an effect rather than a design makes it no less beautiful to see, and it makes it more honest to tell.
On the north flank there is a cylindrical body the locals call the Trulla. It was probably the episcopal baptistery, then nobody quite knew what it was for any more, and in the eighteenth century it became the sacristy.
The part that surprises, though, is underneath. The succorpo is an archaeological area excavated below the floor, holding the remains of the earlier Byzantine cathedral, a stretch of Roman road, funerary chambers, fragments of two small Byzantine churches with pieces of fresco and a polychrome mosaic floor. You walk on gangways over a buried city, and ten minutes there tell you more about Bari than an hour of façades.
One note that saves you a surprise at the door: since 2024 the tourist visit to the cathedral is ticketed, 7 euros including the crypt and the succorpo. Anyone entering to pray or to attend a service does not pay; residents of the archdiocese enter the church free, but pay the special rate for the archaeological area. There is more in the cathedral of San Sabino.
Day 1 · The Exultet scrolls, read the wrong way up
Next to the cathedral, in the archbishop’s palace, is the piece of Bari that no travel guide puts on the cover and that in my view is worth the journey on its own.
The Diocesan Museum holds four illuminated scrolls: three Exultets and a Benedictional of the mid eleventh century. They are very long parchments sewn from several sheets. Exultet 1, datable to 1025-1030, measures 525 centimetres across eight sheets and is among the oldest that survive; the second runs to four metres; the third is thirteenth-century and has no miniatures at all. The first was written in the scriptorium of the monastery of San Benedetto, in a hand palaeographers call Beneventan of the Bari type, a local variant recognisable at a glance.
They were used once a year, at the Easter vigil, for the blessing of the candle. How do you make an illustrated book for people who cannot read? The deacon unrolled the parchment from the ambo, letting it fall in front of him; the text and the musical notation were written the right way up for him, but the images were painted upside down, so that they would come out the right way up for the people standing below. They are illustrated books designed to be looked at by those who cannot read them, and they are the nearest thing to a projector the Middle Ages invented.
Looking at one means seeing a Byzantine miniature eleven centuries old from twenty centimetres away, with no security glass between you and the case, no crowd, and almost always alone. It costs four euros, and I have written about it in full in the Exultet scrolls of Bari.
Day 1 · Bari Vecchia: the Arco Basso and the orecchiette
Coming out of the museum you are already inside the maze, and it is worth getting lost in it without a map for at least half an hour. Bari Vecchia is not a museum-piece old town: people live there, the washing hangs out, and at eight in the evening it smells of dinner.
The street everyone looks for is called via dell’Arco Basso, and it is barely two metres wide. It is the orecchiette alley: the pasta makers bring their small tables out to their own front doors and work the semolina in the street, with a knife and a thumb, one piece at a time.
There is something the guides usually skip, because it spoils the postcard. In 2024 a television investigation showed that on some of the stalls handmade pasta was sitting next to packaged industrial orecchiette, and inspections, seizures and fines followed. The story closed in June 2025 with a code of practice from the council: a food-safety course, stainless-steel tables and sinks, hairnets, and a ban on reselling industrial pasta. Watching them work is still wonderful, and buying is now an informed choice too.
The rest of the old town you visit by nose. The two main streets are strada dei Dottula and strada Palazzo di Città, but the good part is in the side alleys, in the arches that stride across them, and in the churches that turn up one after another, many more than so small an area would lead you to expect. On the seaward side runs the Muraglia, the walkway on top of the sixteenth-century walls, and it is the best walk in the city at sunset: houses packed together on one side, the Adriatic on the other.
Day 1 · Piazza Mercantile, the Column of Justice and the evening
The evening in Bari Vecchia begins in piazza Mercantile, which was the trading square and in substance still is: tables now instead of stalls. The west side is closed by the Palazzo del Sedile, where the city council met, and on the corner stands the Fontana della Pigna, which the locals call the four-faced one.
At the centre there is a low column resting on a stone lion that looks bored. This is the Column of Justice, and the popular name is more exact: colonna infame, the column of shame. The lion carries the inscription Custos Iusticiae on its chest, and the penalty carried out there was not physical but reputational: the insolvent debtor was stripped from the waist down, set astride the lion with his back to the public and his hands tied to the shaft. In a city that lived on personal credit, being seen there meant commercial death. Scholars disagree about the date: some place the column in the mid sixteenth century under the Spanish viceroy Pietro di Toledo, while the historian Luigi Todisco holds that the lion is Roman and was brought here by the Normans between the late eleventh and the early twelfth century. If you want a monument that tells you how a merchant city was really organised, it is that one, not the cathedral.
A hundred metres away opens piazza del Ferrarese, named after a merchant from Ferrara who lived there in the seventeenth century, and below the level of the paving you can see an uncovered stretch of the Via Traiana, the Roman road that ran from Benevento to Brindisi through here. From there you are thirty seconds from the seafront.
Day 2 · The Swabian Castle
The second day begins on the western edge of the old town, where the city defended itself. The Swabian Castle is a trapezoidal block with three bossed corner towers, in the middle of a dry moat that is now a lawn.
Three dates hold it together. Roger II founded it in 1131 on pre-existing Byzantine structures; William the Bad destroyed it along with the city in 1156; Frederick II rebuilt it between 1233 and 1240, and it is his phase you recognise in the portal and the courtyard. In the sixteenth century Isabella of Aragon and her daughter Bona Sforza transformed it twice in a single move: outside they added the bastioned enceinte to take heavy artillery, inside they turned it into a Renaissance residence, with the double-ramp staircase that still climbs to the piano nobile.
Then the usual arc: Bourbon neglect, prison, barracks. Only in 1937 did it become the seat of the Superintendency, and the first floor was given back to the public in 2017, when the offices moved to the nearby complex of Santa Chiara.
On the ground floor you can also visit two small excavation areas with the Byzantine structures below the paving, and it is the second place in two days where you look at the earlier Bari through a hole in the present.
Day 2 · The Gypsotheque, the real reason to go inside the castle
Can you see the Romanesque sculpture of half of Puglia without touring the cathedrals? In the rooms of the west wing, on the ground floor, is the collection that justifies the ticket on its own, and that almost nobody expects to find.
In 1911, for the Regional Ethnographic Exhibition mounted in Rome for the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, two sculptors, Pasquale Duretti and Mario Sabatelli, went round Puglia and took plaster casts of the carved apparatus of its cathedrals: portals, lunettes, capitals, porches, reliefs. Those casts survived, and today they stand in the castle rooms, 130 of them.
The result is that in a single morning you see, life-size and a metre away, the Romanesque sculpture of half a region: the portals of Trani, Ruvo, Bitonto, Altamura, Troia, the ones that in reality sit eight metres up and against the light. For anyone arriving in Bari wanting to understand Apulian Romanesque without a week to tour the cathedrals, this room is the best shortcut there is, and it has a documentary value of its own: the 1911 casts record the state of the stone before a century of smog and restoration. There is more in the Swabian Castle and its Gypsotheque.
Day 2 · The Pinacoteca Corrado Giaquinto
You leave the old town and walk along the seafront into the Palazzo della Provincia, a building of 1935 designed by Luigi Baffa. The picture gallery is on the top floor, and the first thing you notice is that the windows look out on the Adriatic.
It is the largest art museum in Puglia and one of the most important in the south, founded in 1928. The route is chronological and runs from the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century: medieval sculpture and frescoes, Apulian icons of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, fifteenth and sixteenth-century Venetian painting that came from the region’s churches, seventeenth-century Neapolitan work in the Caravaggesque orbit, then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a collection of Neapolitan crib figures.
The piece you go for is Giovanni Bellini’s San Pietro Martire, which came from Monopoli: the Dominican saint standing, in black and white habit, with the billhook still planted in his skull and the face of a man who has not noticed. Beside it hangs the large altarpiece by Paris Bordon and the Vivarini in full, Antonio, Bartolomeo and Alvise, plus Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane and Veronese. Seven works are by the painter the museum is named after, Corrado Giaquinto, born at Molfetta in 1703 and dead at Naples in 1766, court painter in Madrid and far less known in Italy than he deserves. The full account is in the Pinacoteca of Bari.
Day 2 · The Murat quarter and the Teatro Margherita
The last half day is spent in the Bari that is not old, and that is the reason the city works. The Murat quarter is the nineteenth-century grid laid out at the wish of Joachim Murat in 1813: straight streets, regular blocks, and via Sparano as the axis of the shops and the evening stroll. Anyone arriving from the station walks through it, and it is fifteen minutes on foot to the sea.
On the seafront stand the two theatres, and the story that links them is the best Bari can tell about itself. The Teatro Petruzzelli was built by the Petruzzelli brothers, shipowners, and the family obtained a pact from the council: the administration undertook not to allow other theatres on municipal land. A monopoly, in writing, with a single exception: buildings on the sea.
Somebody read the clause carefully. Between 1912 and 1914, to a design by Francesco De Giglio with the engineer Luigi Santarella, the Teatro Margherita was built on piles, in the water, the first reinforced-concrete building in Bari and a very rare solution in Europe. It opened as the Kursaal Margherita. Today it is an exhibition space, reached along a walkway.
The Petruzzelli, for its part, ended up both worse and better: it burned down on the night of 27 October 1991 in an arson attack, and reopened rebuilt in 2009. It can be visited, but keep expectations modest: the guided tour lasts half an hour, covers the foyer and the stalls, and the calendar changes month by month, concentrated at weekends. Worth it if you happen to be there on the right day, not worth planning around.
If you arrive on a Monday, and two other ways to turn the itinerary round
If you arrive on a Monday, swap the two days without thinking about it: do the old town first, since it is all open anyway, and keep the castle and the gallery for Tuesday. It is the one case where the order of this guide should be reversed, and it is also the most frequent, because a good number of low-cost flights into Bari land on a Monday.
If you arrive on a Sunday, the thing to watch is the Pinacoteca, which closes at 1 pm on Sunday rather than 7, and the Swabian Castle, which from October to March closes at 1.30 pm on Sundays other than the first of the month. Sunday morning is therefore the morning for museums, not for churches, which hold out until evening.
If you have only one day, cut the Pinacoteca and not the Diocesan Museum. That is the opposite of what instinct suggests, because a gallery with a Bellini in it sounds more important than four parchments. But you can see the Bellini’s like in twenty other Italian cities, and the Exultets of Bari you cannot.
With a third day: Apulian Romanesque outside Bari
If the Gypsotheque has left you wanting the originals, the third day organises itself, because all the cathedrals sit on the same coastal railway line.
The cathedral of Trani is forty minutes away by train and is the one everybody photographs, for the obvious reason that it stands planted on the sea with its bell tower straddling an arch; its bronze door is by Barisano da Trani, and you will have just seen the cast of it in the Gypsotheque. The cathedral of Ruvo di Puglia is less known and has a hypogeum no other has. Further south, Castel del Monte is the most enigmatic building Frederick II left behind, that is, by the same man who rebuilt the castle in Bari.
And if you want to change register entirely, the trulli of Alberobello are an hour and a half away by car or by the Ferrovie del Sud Est, and have nothing to do with Romanesque: which is exactly why they work as a third day.
Practical information
Checked on 2 September 2026 on the official site of every individual venue. Prices and hours change: before you travel check at least the Swabian Castle, which charges a higher rate when it hosts an exhibition.
Tickets. The basilica of San Nicola is free, like any church. The cathedral of San Sabino costs 7 euros for the visitor route, and the price includes the crypt and the archaeological area of the succorpo; the Museum of the Exultet costs 4 euros, and the combined cathedral and museum ticket costs 9, with a family rate of 20. The Swabian Castle costs 6 euros full and 2 reduced, rising to 9 and 3.50 during exhibitions. The Pinacoteca Corrado Giaquinto costs 5 euros full and 2 reduced for the categories the museum lists, among them university and AFAM students; under-18s and over-65s enter free. Guided tours of the Teatro Petruzzelli cost 7 euros and 2 reduced.
Opening hours. The basilica of San Nicola opens Monday to Saturday from 6.30 am to 8.30 pm and on Sunday from 6.30 am to 10 pm. Cathedral and Museum of the Exultet: every day 9 am to 9 pm from April to September and 9 am to 7 pm from October to March, last entry a quarter of an hour before. Swabian Castle: closed Monday; April to September Tuesday to Sunday 9 am to 7 pm; October to March Tuesday to Saturday and the first Sunday of the month 9 am to 7 pm, other Sundays 9 am to 1.30 pm. Pinacoteca: closed Monday and on midweek public holidays, Tuesday to Saturday 9 am to 7 pm with last entry at 6.30 and Sunday 9 am to 1 pm with last entry at 12.30.
Free entry. The Swabian Castle and the Pinacoteca are free on the first Sunday of the month. In the cathedral anyone attending a service does not pay; residents of the archdiocese enter the church free, while the special rate applies to the archaeological area. At the Pinacoteca over-65s enter free too.
Getting there and getting around. From Karol Wojtyła airport the Ferrotramviaria train reaches Bari Centrale in a quarter of an hour, with departures every twenty or thirty minutes and an integrated ticket around 5.30 euros. From the station to piazza del Ferrarese is fifteen minutes on foot in a straight line along via Sparano. Inside the old town you need no transport, and none for the castle or the gallery either: every stop in this guide sits within a kilometre.
How long each stop takes. The basilica of San Nicola with the crypt takes an hour. The cathedral with the succorpo asks forty minutes, the Museum of the Exultet another thirty. The Swabian Castle with the Gypsotheque wants an hour and a half. The Pinacoteca asks two hours, an hour and a quarter if you aim only at the Venetians and Giaquinto. For Bari Vecchia allow two hours of aimless walking, which is the best part.
On affiliate links, for the sake of honesty. There are no bookable-ticket links in this guide. The two paid venues have no queues and sell at the desk, the cathedral and the diocesan museum share a single box office on site, and the churches are free. Sending you to a reseller would save you neither time nor money.
Safe travels, and do not turn up on a Monday afternoon expecting to start at the castle.
Photo credits: basilica of San Nicola by Holger Uwe Schmitt; cathedral façade and rose window, Teatro Margherita and piazza Mercantile by Benjamin Smith; crypt of San Nicola and Column of Justice by Enric; Gypsotheque by Acquario51; Exultet of the Diocesan Museum by Benjamin Smith; via dell’Arco Basso by Andreasciacqua00; cathedral of Trani by Francesco Falconetti (CC BY-SA 4.0); Bari seafront by Bernard Gagnon (CC0); San Pietro Martire by Giovanni Bellini photographed by Sailko (CC BY 3.0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
