According to legend, in ancient times the inhabitants of San Giovanni Rotondo lived in a village perched on the top of a hill without water.
One day, they noticed that some pigs had their snouts wet with water.
Following the pigs, the men found a small lake in a place at the foot of the hill and decided to immediately build the new village nearby.
Another story is also far away in time, which tells of the existence of various settlements in the past. From the union of these the city of San Giovanni Rotondo would be born.
However things actually happened, it is certain that the current historic center of San Giovanni Rotondo flourished around the year one thousand.
Its protected position, the presence of water in the swimming pool area, the proximity to an important road, will make this center the strongest compared to the other farmhouses scattered in the surrounding area. The hamlets were small villages that were poorly urbanized and almost always without defense works. To the east of the town, perhaps an isolated surviving testimony of a now abandoned farmhouse, stood the church of San Giovanni Battista, or della Rotonda, known by the inhabitants of San Giovanni Rotondo by the name of San Giuanne a Llonghe, that is, San Giovanni far from ancient settlement. The name of the city derives from circular shape of the church, Saint Johnin fact Rotondo.
It is therefore starting from the Middle Ages that an urban conscience was formed in which to identify the political events, the military events, the deaths, the joys and the spaces of the historical life of the community. But before then what was happening in our city?
The story of human settlement shows numerous points of contact in the San Giovanni Rotondo area with what was simultaneously occurring in the Gargano promontory. The area of Pantano, or lake of Sant'Egidio, offered man, still a hunter and gatherer, an abundance of water and game; the woods surrounding the area represented an ideal habitat. The absence of flint, from which man obtained tools and arrowheads, was made up for by importing this hard stone from the coast, starting a rudimentary form of economy based on barter.
On the banks of the lake, which dried up in the early twentieth century, some stone tools were found, most likely dating back to the Middle Paleolithic, around 45.000 years ago.
With the big one Neolithic Revolution man becomes a farmer and breeder, abandons the nomadic form of life and becomes sedentary. Especially starting from the 4th millennium BC, the Tavoliere plain and the Walloons, which overlook this plain, offer the most important evidence in the territory. In the plains, the typology of the settlements follows that of the entrenched villages of the Tavoliere, surrounded by characteristic ditches dug into the ground and highlighted by aerial photographs. In the Walloons, the control of the hills and the foothills and hilly slopes was useful for man; the flocks climbed up the promontory from the valley bottom, and in the caves, which were abundant throughout the territory, the shepherd found shelter and practiced worship. The villages of Masseria Candelaro, Masseria Cascavilla, Valle dell'Inferno are the best known sites. The latter is particularly important. In the prehistoric area of Valle dell'Inferno, full of caves and shelters, the remains of fences made of dry stone walls can be found on the plateaus; it would be the equivalent of the trenches that were dug in the plain, impossible to dig into the mountain rock.
From the early Bronze Age onwards, in addition to the existing ones, some rock settlements of a pastoral and seasonal nature arose. About 3500 years ago the fortified village on Mount Castellana was built and inhabited.
Behind the Crocicchia, about a kilometer North-North West from the historic centre, the village, stretched in the shape of an ogive from 852 to 800 m above sea level, occupies a total area of about two and a half hectares. The walls and access doors still remain of the village. It is probable that around two hundred people lived here, mainly dedicated to sheep farming. The processing of milk is demonstrated by the discovery on site of remains of filter vases and kettles.
Few but significant traces therefore re-emerge from Prehistory. They allow us to draw a background in which we can already glimpse intense commercial and transit activities for men and goods; activities that will be the raison d'être for the settlement formed starting from the early Middle Ages. A previous testimony, even if not attributable to the medieval farmhouse, is the small and unknown one pagus Daunian (village) which must have roughly corresponded to the area of the current historic centre. The few scientific publications written on San Giovanni Rotondo around the 60s refer to the Daunian findings. Valuable vases came from Daunian tombs, taken unscientifically over the years, and mostly dating back to the XNUMXth-XNUMXth century BC
Built around the year 21, until the mid-1273th century the hamlet of San Giovanni Rotondo was under the control of the Benedictine Abbey of San Giovanni in Lamis, today the Convent of San Matteo. On XNUMX September XNUMX Abbot Parisio assigned the farmhouse to the French noble Teobaldo d'Helamant for forty ounces of gold per year. Free from the hegemony of the nearby and powerful abbey, the citizens transformed the city, extending control over the surrounding territory, intensifying economic activities, building a city wall protected by several towers all around the town, a tangible symbol of a painful autonomy, unfortunately not destined to last long.
The fourteenth century was a golden century for San Giovanni Rotondo. The population increases. In San Giovanni Rotondo, merchants and farmers gather for the grain fair, which was later moved to Foggia, in the spaces surrounding the church of Sant'Onofrio. The road that leads to Monte Sant'Angelo appears as a point of reference for a city that owes its main reason for existence to its roads and privileged position within the Gargano promontory. But we cannot forget the signs of the sacred, intimate essence of the road. Shelters, chapels and monasteries arose almost everywhere, marking the long and tiring journey of pilgrims traveling towards the Archangel's cave. Today we prefer to assign a symbolic value to this pilgrimage road; it is known to the Christian world by the name of Francigena road for the presence among the pilgrims of numerous Franks and knights from northern Europe.
Gaugello Gaugelli, a man of letters from the Urbino court who lived in the mid-fifteenth century, writes about San Giovanni Rotondo: «On the right hand, along another street, Santo Ianni Rotundo and the Porcina can be found whoever wants to go shopping», reiterating the strategic commercial function of this settlement, now firmly articulated in its urban spaces.
Economic history and demographic history, between critical moments and recoveries, trace the profile of the events that in the eighteenth century led to the acquisition of greater levels of wealth and new places alongside those of the historic center, which had now become cramped for the growing population . The social fabric is becoming more and more complex and the information is also becoming more dense, often deducible from a rapidly evolving urban image. Evidence of this renewed fervor are the churches, with their precious make-up, the palaces, some coats of arms and friezes that last until well into the nineteenth century.
Until the 1947s, the city included the historic center, the space included from the Giro Esterno, today Corso Nazionale, the houses and the school of Via degli Studi, today Via Kennedy, up to Sant'Onofrio, and a few other houses built on the road which leads to the Capuchins. Since XNUMX, the year the foundation stone was laid, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza has been the tangible element of economic and urban development for San Giovanni Rotondo, which has substantially changed its urban image in just a few years.