Highlights:

Discover the Jatta National Archaeological Museum with thousands of vases
Visit the cathedral, one of the most important in Romanesque style in Puglia
Explore the remains of the castle and the defensive ramparts

Tour details:

Ruvo is a town of 25,000 inhabitants almost unknown but that worth a visit especially for the two jewels that it hides: the Jatta National Archaeological Museum and the Romanesque cathedral.
Our visit will start from Piazza Giovanni Bovio, in front of the Palazzo Jatta dated 1840. Inside we will visit the only example in Italy of a nineteenth-century private collection that has remained unchanged from the original museographic conception. The finds preserved in the museum were collected by the archaeologist Giovanni Jatta in the early nineteenth century, later it was enriched by his nephew and was sold to the state in the twentieth century. The exhibition is organized in 4 rooms: the first contains terracotta vases with geometric decorations dating back to the peucet age of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The second room contains about 700 vases of Greek or local production. The third room contains over four hundred pieces and several craters positioned on a column. In the fourth and last room you can admire more than 270 artifacts and the vase of Talos, one of the most important ceramographic masterpieces. On the vase is depicted the episode narrated by Apollonius Rodio in the Argonautics about the killing of Talos by Medea, sustained dying from the arms of Castor and Pollux. After the visit of the Museum, the tour continues in the historical center passing through the Aragonese tower towards the cathedral, dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, one of the most important examples of Apulian Romanesque style. Inside you can also visit the hypogeum discovered in 1975 and outside the 37 meters high bell tower before the cathedral.
Leaving the Cathedral, the tour will take you in front of the clock tower built in 1604 and then finish in front of the remains of the castle with a quadrangular plan consisting of two buildings in the center of which the tower still stands. Initially this fortress consisted only of the tower, dating back to the tenth or eleventh century, from which it was possible to control the four gates of access to the city.