Piazza del Ferrarese

You are standing on Piazza del Ferrarese, one of the liveliest squares in Bari, located at the junction between two worlds: the medieval old town behind you and the modern city stretching out in front. Now, look down at your feet. In the small open excavation, you can see large limestone slabs, these are the basole of the Via Traiana, the Roman road built in the 2nd century AD by Emperor Trajan to connect Benevento to Brindisi. Beneath these stones, archaeologists have uncovered millennia of history in just a few meters: Bronze Age huts, Greek tombs, and even medieval gold coins. On one of the walls of the square, along Corso Vittorio Emanuele Secondo, a plaque recalls a more unexpected chapter in European history. On February 3, 1859, in front of the old communal market palace, the heir to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Francesco II of Bourbon, met his wife, Maria Sofia of Bavaria, sister of the famous Empress Sissi, for the first time. Their marriage had already been celebrated by proxy a few weeks earlier. Bari thus became the place of their first meeting. Just a few months after this meeting, history was to take a dramatic turn. In 1860, General Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition landed in the south of the peninsula to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and unite these territories with the future Kingdom of Italy. The young royal couple, Francesco II of Bourbon and Maria Sofia of Bavaria, found themselves at the heart of the turmoil. Their reign, which had barely begun, was very short-lived: in less than two years, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which had dominated all of southern Italy for over a century, disappeared and was integrated into the new Italian state. Forced into exile after the fall of their last stronghold in Gaeta in 1861, they became the last rulers of a kingdom now erased from the map.