The history of Ruvo di Puglia begins with the founding of the first villages in 2000 B.C. and reaches the present day. The history of this town in the land of Bari is lost in the mists of time:. little or nothing was known of its origins and history until the 19th century when prestigious vases. and numerous coins from ancient times emerged from the soil of the Ruvo countryside, giving the people of Ruvo a space, time and place in history. Ruvo has existed under the rule of a number of external powers, from the Greeks to the Normans and the Bourbons.
Toponym
Scholars of all ages have always encountered difficulties in offering a correct etymological interpretation of the name Ruvo. Salvatore Fenicia, a prolific nineteenth-century polygraph, in his Monograph of Ruvo of Magna Graecia failed to infer its derivation, citing its cause in the frequent destructions of the city that would lead, in his opinion, to a case of etymological damnatio memoriae.. The same result was obtained by archaeologist Giovanni Jatta, a contemporary of Fenicia, who managed, however, to unravel some misinterpretations of the name of Ruvo in antiquity and derive the root and the Greek name of the city, to which Fenicia himself agreed. Jatta, in fact, first identified the writers of the classical world who mentioned Ruvo starting with Strabo's Netium, identifying it with a territory between Canosa and Ceglie (thus Gravina or Ruvo) and not as an unknown place,. to Pliny the Elder's Rubustini (which clearly indicates the population of Ruvo).. to Horace's Rubos, to Sextus Julius Frontinus rubustinus ager. and ending with the misinterpretation of the Apulian Ruvo mistaken for the Lucanian Ruvo by Roberto Stefano. and by the ancient commentators of Virgil and Horace who had mistaken Rubi for Ruvo del Monte and Rufris (the Latin name for Ruvo del Monte) for Ruvo di Puglia.. Finally, Jatta in the introduction to his work also refuted the hypothesis of those who identified Rudiae, hometown of the Latin poet Quintus Ennius, with Ruvo since there are archaeological remains of his true homeland between Taranto and Brindisi.. Of a totally adverse opinion to Jatta was Gaetano Moroni, author of the Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, who places among the illustrious men of Ruvo Domenico Cotugno and the poet Quintus Ennius and then identifies Ruvo with Strabo's Rudium and affixes to it the Latin name Ruben, hypothesizing the Ruvestine people as descendants of Reuben, son of Jacob..
The name of the site is first attested on a series of coins of the 3rd century BCE, which bear legends in Greek characters: ΡΥΨ (Rhyps), ΡΥΒΑ (Rhyba), and ΡΥΒΑΣΤΕΙΝΩΝ (Rhybasteinon). In the 1st century BCE, the poet Horace referred to the inhabitants as the Rubi, and in the 1st century CE they appear in Pliny the Elder's list of the peoples of Apulia as the Rubustini.Horace, Satires 1.5.94: inde Rubos fessi pervenimus; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 3.105. The name of the town remained Rubi throughout the Middle Ages.
The citizens of Ruvo are presently called ruvesi; however, they may also be called rubastini (from the Greek "Ῥυβαστεῖνοι," Rhybasteinoi) and ruvestini (presumably from the Latin rubustinus with the phonetic mutation of the b into v), the latter demonym may be used as a literary or higher form of ruvese.
Ancient Ruvo
The history of Ruvo di Puglia gravitates around the fate of its countryside (ager rubustinus in Liber Coloniarum), still the third largest in the Province of Bari, which has always been divided into villages and contrade, such as the Contrada Matine in which specimens of petrified shells have been found, evidence of the antiquity of the Murgia soil and the marine formation of Apulia.. Some worked stone artifacts reveal the settlement of some populations in the Ruvian countryside as early as the Middle Paleolithic, while remains of Neolithic villages prove the presence of man since the sixth millennium B.C. During the Bronze Age, the area pertaining to Ruvo di Puglia was later inhabited by the Morgetes, an Ausonian people, around 2000 B.C. and they took control of the original Ruvestine settlement in the area of the road leading from the Pulo di Molfetta to Matera, establishing a village of huts (about 14,000 inhabitants in a perimeter of 900 meters). about 15 kilometers from Ruvo. Evidence of this era is abundant and it is outlined as a village active in metal and stone working and trade, as can be inferred from a bronze axe found in Contrada Montedoro and some ornaments of the same material. With the Iron Age and the arrival of the Iapygians from Illyria, the Morgetes were forced to migrate southward. The Iapygians distinguished themselves into three different groups and cultures, the Messapians in Salento, the Peucetians in the Land of Bari, and the Daunians in the Tavoliere delle Puglie. The Peucetians therefore inherited the proto-urban settlement and founded Ruvo initially as a hilltop village where the municipal pine forest and the church of St. Michael the Archangel now stand.. From a small village it soon became one of the main Peucetian cities, retaining relations with other villages, such as Sidis/Silvium (today's Gravina in Puglia), indigenous to the area and with the Etruscans to the north but also with the first colonies of Magna Graecia to the south, especially due to a maritime emporium, indicated by ancient sources as Respa, today's Cala San Giacomo in Molfetta..
Between the 8th and 5th centuries B.C. some groups of settlers from Crete peacefully colonized the Peucetian village, overlapping and integrating with the already existing community, transforming it into an autonomous Greek city named Rhyps. With the arrival of the Greeks, the city experienced its moment of maximum splendor around the 4th century B.C., boasting a very large territory (the Ruvo countryside of the Greek era included Molfetta, Terlizzi, Corato, Trani, Bisceglie and Andria) and a population that was never reached again.. Ruvo became a prosperous Greek city and its wealth was based on trade in oil and wine and a flourishing production of pottery, as evidenced by the vast necropolis in which tombs containing bronze, silver and gold objects have been found.. The city first became an ally of Athens,. as evidenced by some coins endowed with the helmeted Athena typical of the Attic power, reaching the height of its military might. Ruvo thus became independent, minting silver coins, and it was during this period that Ruvo received the large number of vases from Greece and gold from the trade held with the Etruscans. The necropolis played a major role in increasing the city's international reputation because of the thousands of Peucetian, Greek and Latin artifacts and the building of the ancient historical heritage forgotten until the early 20th century. The rediscovery of Ruvo's ancient history took place due to the local noble families, including the Jatta (later founders of the museum of the same name), the Caputi, the Fenicia and the Lojodice, who by setting up their own private museums curbed the buying and selling of those finds that now constitute the purest evidence of the city's past prestige in Greek times, such as the vase of Talos and the tomb of the warrior (or dancers) preserved at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.. Numerous villages also emerged in the Ruvestine countryside, including some near Calentano and the Mattine district.
From 324 B.C. the city came into the orbit of Rome, which conquered Apulia following the Samnite Wars and the conflict with Taranto, thus ending the Hellenistic age in the said region. Under Roman rule Rubi enjoyed numerous privileges including legislative autonomy. However, with the passage of time this freedom was restricted with the granting of Roman citizenship and the title of municipium. Also attested is Rubi's membership in the Claudia tribe, one of the thirty-one rustic tribes. Ruvo's importance in Roman times is testified by its role as a station on the Via Traiana and by an epigraph, now located in Piazza Menotti Garibaldi, dedicated to Emperor Gordian III, which reports the existence in the city of the college of augustals.. The same street, which crossed Ruvo, was traveled by the poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, as reported in the Satires in the Iter Brundisinum. In the first century A.D. one of the oldest Christian dioceses was established in Ruvo, according to tradition: legend has it that St. Peter passed through Ruvo twice in 44 and on the first time converted some local pagans while on the second time, fleeing Rome from the persecutions of Emperor Claudius, he reconverted the same faithful who had returned to paganism, leaving as the first bishop of the city and the Apulian region St. Cletus (future third pope), to keep the faith alive in the nascent Christian community. The first Ruvestine Christians gathered in a cistern that served as a catacomb and a place of worship; a statue of the saint was also carved in stone in this place, to such an extent that the place is identified today as the cave of Saint Cletus. Under Roman rule the plan of the city was most likely to coincide with the historic center as evidenced by the remains of a domus below the Co-cathedral. In imperial times Ruvo was surrounded by walls and later suffered a first decrease in territory, as around the 5th century the cities of Molfetta, Trani and Bisceglie were established, thus preventing contact with the sea.
Medieval Ruvo
For Ruvo, the fifth century meant the end of economic and political influence. Having fallen the Western Empire, it suffered, like the rest of the peninsula, the invasions of the Goths who razed the Roman city to the ground in 533, reducing it to a pile of rubble and thus raising the present ground about 5 or 7 meters. The survivors therefore moved down the hill building the new city above the necropolis and existing buildings only to be conquered by the Lombards in 567. In 857 Ruvo was sacked by Saracens who settled near the Purgatory Church and in the wide area still called Fondo Marasco (evolution of Fondo Moresco). To avoid finding themselves unprepared before their enemies, the Ruvestines endowed the new medieval city with very high walls, equipped with square towers and as many as four gates: Porta Noè or Noja (present-day Via Vittorio Veneto), Porta del Buccettolo (Via Campanella), Porta del Castello (Piazza Matteotti) and Porta Nuova or Sant'Angelo (Corso Piave). In the 11th century, during the Swabian-Norman era, the fortress town became part of the county of Conversano. However, the Count of Conversano, Tancredi, formed a coalition with other barons in the area rebelling against King Roger II of Sicily, who in 1129 reconquered all the revolting towns including Ruvo, the only one to put up a strenuous resistance due to its mighty walls. Legend has it that Roger II, seeing the difficulty in conquering Ruvo, had cunningly induced some local barons to betray the city thus allowing its conquest. Swabian rule, especially in the time span from 1166 to 1266, represented an economic and cultural rebirth for the local community. In this period the Romanesque cathedral, commissioned by Robert II of Bassunvilla, was built. In the same period between Ruvo and Canosa, at the behest of Frederick II of Swabia, the Castel del Monte was built. In addition, the Ruvestine countryside underwent a second reduction as Peter the Norman founded the cities of Corato and Andria. In this era the fief of Ruvo was also traversed by St. Francis of Assisi, who invited the inhabitants to build a new church (in which the Observant Friars Minor would later settle) on the site of the ruins of an old temple of Basilian monks..