Norman-Hohenstaufen Castle

The Norman-Hohenstaufen Castle is a medieval building in Sannicandro di Bari, in Southern Italy. It is located in the medieval part of town, between the characteristics houses with external staircases, surrounded by a moat, filled and turned into a street in 1836. It is composed of two distinct parts, put into each other, built in separate periods by the Byzantines and the Hohenstaufens. Its construction dates back to 916, the initiative of the Byzantine general Niccolò Piccingli, who had ordered the construction of a fortress for the defence of Apulia against the Saracens. It was located north of the small township of Sannicandro that, just in a century and a half, developed at the edge of the ruins of the ancient castle Mezardo. The original core of the castle, of Byzantine origin, consists of a sturdy brick wall of stone that runs along the trapezoidal layout, equipped with six four-sided towers distributed in the four vertices and the midpoint of the two bases of the trapezoid.