Gravina in Puglia is a town and comune of the Metropolitan City of Bari, Apulia, southern Italy.
The word gravina comes from the Latin grava, with the meaning of rock, shaft and erosion of bank river. Alternatively, when the emperor Frederick II went to Gravina, because of the large extension of the lands and for the presence of wheat, he decided to give to it the motto Grana dat et vina., that is to say It offers wheat and wine.. Gravina is the home of the Alta Murgia National Park.
Thanks to its strategic position, Gravina has a very ancient history. Its territory has been inhabited since the Paleolithic, due to the high presence of water and woods. The largest remains date back to the Neolithic. An important find of a skeleton belonging to an Asiatic man in the Vagnari necropolis testifies the existence of relations between the town of Gravina and the Far East already in 200 BCE. The town was colonized by the Greeks and became a polis with the right to mint its own coinage. Later it was ruled by Byzantines, Lombards and North African Muslims. The town was also the site of a Norman countship in the Hauteville Kingdom of Sicily and in the later Kingdom of Naples. From 1386 to 1816 it was a fief of the Orsini family: the pope Benedict XIII (Pietro Francesco Orsini-Gravina) was born here in 1649.
The most important monuments of Gravina are: Cathedral (11th-12th centuries) – built by the Normans in Romanesque style. Destroyed by fires and earthquakes in the mid-15th century, it houses a splendid reliquary of an arm of the English Thomas Becket; The remains of Frederick II's castle, site on a hill nearby the town, designed in 1231; San Francesco – late 15th-early 16th-century church; Madonna delle Grazie – Baroque-style church; San Sebastiano – Renaissance-style church; San Michele delle Grotte – 10th-century church carved out from the tuff rocks (one of the Chiese rupestri). It has also a well preserved Roman bridge, dating to at least 1686. Following the earthquake of 1722, the bridge was restored and transformed into an aqueduct by the Orsini family of Rome, who then moved to Gravina around the middle of the 18th century.