After leaving Trani, we spent an uncomfortable night in the sweltering heat at a campsite in Giovinazzo just south of Bari, poorly mitigated by a difficult swim off the rocky beach nearby.  Later, a Reggae concert on the beach continued well into the night.

Bari is the capital city of the of the Puglia region on the Adriatic Sea. It’s the second largest city in southern Italy after Naples and a major port and this is where the Centofanti saga continued.  First we went to the Commune di Bari, Demographic Records Office to try to get Galileo’s passport details in the hope his application contained information about his parents only to be told that all passport applications are all held in the Questura for Puglia, (the Police archives in Bari).   So off we go to the Police Station to be told the archive office is closed and that anyway an application should be made in writing before we can proceed with any search.

Undaunted we went to the State Archives Office where old registers from Puglia are being filmed and stored online.  Despite attempts at the entrance to put us off, first saying the office was closed and then that everyone was out at lunch and wouldn’t be back as it was the weekend, once inside the people were friendly and welcoming. Two in particular – Rosella Perna and Mariolina Pansini – were absolute gems.  They warmed to our cause, put off their lunch and proceeded to search the Trani registers and bingo! –  there was a Centofanti in the Trani register.  The documents bore the mark (curiously, in English, not Italian) “water damaged” and the writing was very difficult to decipher.  The name “Centofanti”, written in the typical italic calligraphy of the time was however unmistakable but the first name very difficult to make out.  Ms Perna and Ms Pansini complained about how badly people wrote in those days but it was clearly the damage to the documents that was the problem. They thought the name started with an ‘R’ and could have been ‘Renato’ or ‘Rocco’. They gave us details on how to access and search the archives on the portal (‘Il Portale Archivistico degli Antenati‘) and suggested we look at marriage entries as they would give us family details – we should look under the registro ‘Napoleonico’ for 1809-15, ‘Restaurazione’ for 1816-61 and ‘Italiano’ for 1861-1900.  Our search for Flavio’s grandfather would come under ‘Restaurazione’.

After a short stroll in the city to look for a replacement tent (which we eventually found and bought from the puzzlingly-named “Mercoledi Santo” (Ash Wednesday) camping shop, as well as another unproductive search for a slightly bigger electric fan, which the whole country seems to have run out of thanks to the heatwave, we had 2 days until our ferry out of Bari and decided to spend them venturing a little further south near Lecce.

First though, we stopped at the Mozart Caffeteria/Gelateria at the Via Melo for a caffe and gelato, watched over by a rather grumpy-looking San Nicola di Bari.  It seemed to cater for interesting ‘intellectual’ members of Bari society – academics perhaps and professional types.