Apulia siticulosa (thirsty Apulia). With this phrase, Horace (Epodes, 3.16) fixed in the ancient imagination the image of a land parched and craving water, seemingly unable to quench its own thirst. And indeed, Apulia has long been portrayed as a region fated to live with scarcity. Popular memory sought not only to reinterpret that condition but also to find ways of living with it through ritual practices – naïve at times, yet remarkably enduring. Writing on Pregiudizi astrologici, meteorologici e calendaristici, the folklorist Saverio La Sorsa (1877–1970), professor at the Regio Istituto Tecnico “Pitagora” of Bari, observed: “Every town has its patron saint to whom it turns for rain; and in addition to prayers, litanies, and flowers, people offer blessed bread rolls, small votive images, even the crack of ceremonial mortars.” (Rassegna e Bollettino di Statistica del Comune di Taranto, 28, 11-12 (1959), pp. 1-15: p. 7).
Equally vivid was the remedy proposed in Scarsezza delle pioggie nella Puglia piana (Bari, 1793) by Michele Ventrelli (1767–1810). The physician from Bari imagined building towers so tall they could arrest passing clouds and force them to open in rainfall. The idea hovered somewhere between provocation and utopia, but it underscored how urgent and unsettling the water question was in the South. At the same time, Ventrelli recognised the problem’s double edge: Apulia’s dryness, he claimed, helped preserve its inhabitants’ health, whereas heavy rains might usher in illness and disorder.
Rain in Apulia has never been merely a welcome gift. At times it has inspired wonder; at others, it has ushered in catastrophe. On 10 March 1901, a shower stained the petals and leaves in the garden of Cosimo De Giorgi (1842–1922), physician of Lizzanello (Lecce) and director of one of the oldest meteorological observatories in the region. Gathering the reddish grains that had fallen from the sky, he examined them under the microscope and identified siliceous shells of diatoms – organisms that could hardly have drifted from the African deserts, as was commonly believed. The rain, he concluded, had come from oceanic or Balkan regions, whose soil – rich in organic remains – had been swept into the air and carried across the Adriatic. Thus a phenomenon long linked to the myth of “blood rain” found a more grounded explanation.
Yet Apulia’s rains have not only inspired curiosity; they have also brought destruction. Bari experienced this repeatedly, especially in autumn, when the November sky grows heavy with water. Local chronicles recount with dread the floods that struck the city in the early twentieth century, submerging streets and workshops, invading homes, and leaving behind mud, wreckage, and loss. The plaques still visible on the boundary between the Murat and Libertà districts, inscribed with the water levels reached in 1905, 1915, and 1926, stand as silent witnesses to those tragedies.
From the nineteenth century onward, the region began to respond to the dual nature of rain – marvellous yet perilous – not only with ritual but with science. In 1884, on the rooftop of the Palazzo Ateneo, Bari established a meteorological observatory annexed to the Regio Istituto Tecnico e Nautico. There, precision instruments – barometers, thermographs, rain gauges – recorded every atmospheric fluctuation. Daily observations, transmitted to the Central Meteorological Office in Rome, translated atmospheric turbulence into ordered sequences of figures and charts.
The institute’s annual reports bear witness to this new approach. After the interruption of the Great War, the publication of meteorological series resumed in the 1920s, together with the detailed analyses of the physicist Amedeo Nobile. His diagrams and curves reveal at a glance the sudden surge of rainfall, the sharp climb of percentages – the silent chronicle of inundated streets and disrupted lives. Storms became data; water, a calamity but also an object of knowledge – something that could, at least in part, be managed.
This interplay – between drought and flood, wonder and analysis, popular memory and technical recording – shapes the history of water in Apulia. It is not a distant history. Bari’s last major flood, in 2005, made painfully clear how exposed the city remains to the lash of heavy rain. The section of the exhibition presented here invites visitors to retrace this long trajectory: from marvellous rains to destructive ones, from ritual readings to scientific interpretation. It is a story of wonder, disaster, and meteorological inquiry – a story not only of water itself, but of the human capacity (and the enduring illusion) of mastering it: to understand, to prevent, to survive.

___ Francesco Paolo de Ceglia & Stefano Daniele