Thirteen kilometres down the coast from Barletta, TRANI is a very different kind of place, with a cosmopolitan air not found in any of the other towns nearby. One of the most important medieval Italian ports, it was a prosperous trading centre with a large mercantile and Jewish community, during the Middle Ages rivalling Bari as a commercial port and in the fourteenth century powerful enough to take on the domineering Venetians.

Twentieth-century Trani is s... [More]