Where Empires Began and Ended
Once upon a time, Puglia was the centre of the known world. And at its heart stood Brindisi.
Standing at the top of the Scalinata Virgiliana – the broad harbour staircase where a single Roman column still marks the end of the ancient world’s greatest road – it is easy to feel the distance between what Brindisi was and what it appears to be today. A working port city, relatively modest by the standards of Italy’s great urban centres, passed through by most visitors en route to Greece or the beaches of Salento.
But that first impression does Brindisi a profound injustice.
…the Appia turned Brindisi into a global powerhouse, from which the Roman Army set off to expand its empire east to cities like Alexandria and Jerusalem. Eventually, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of the human population across three continents.
National geographic, A Roman-Era ’superhighway’
This is a city that was, for centuries, one of the great intersections of the Mediterranean, the point where the known world ended and the wider world began. Connected to Rome by the Appian Way, the 540-kilometre road that the poet Statius called regina viarum, queen of roads, the city the Romans knew as Brundisium was empire’s eastern gateway. From this harbour Roman legions marched to Alexandria and Jerusalem, and crusaders set sail for the Holy Land. Here, in the autumn of 1943, Italy’s King and government found a safe haven, having fled a collapsing regime – making Brindisi, briefly and improbably, the capital city of Italy.
Everyone, at some point, came to Brindisi. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Venetians, Crusaders, British empire-builders rushing to catch the Indian Mail. Julius Caesar blockaded its port. Mark Antony and Octavian divided the Roman world here. Virgil died here. Shakespeare wrote about it. And for five months in the winter of 1943-44, the fate of a nation was decided from its harbourside.
Today’s Brindisi has been quietly reinventing itself. A regenerated seafront promenade lined with palms and restaurants, Baroque churches tucked into narrow streets, a thriving commercial port, and an airport with daily connections across Europe – the city remains what it has always been: a place of arrivals and departures, of journeys beginning and ending.
Most visitors still pass through. You probably shouldn’t.
What follows is the full story of Brindisi, one of the truly consequential cities of the ancient world – its Roman foundations, its civil wars, its crusading fleets, its poets and its wartime capital. It is a history as rich as anywhere in Italy, and it begins, as so much Italian history does, with a road.
Brindisi | Empires, Crusaders and Poets
Origins: The Stag’s Head Harbour
The very name of the city is a window into its deep past. The name derives from the Messapian word biendos, meaning “stag’s head,” which likely refers to the pronged, antler-like shape of its natural harbour. The Messapians, thought to have migrated from the Balkans, were the original inhabitants, and later legends credited the mythical Thracian king Diomedes as founder, a myth that itself reflects the city’s long connections with the eastern Aegean world. Greek settlers from Knossos or from nearby Taras (modern Taranto) established a colony here, calling it Brentesion, before Rome took the town from the Greeks in the middle of the 3rd century BC.
What the Romans recognised immediately was the harbour’s extraordinary geometry: a narrow entrance opening into a sheltered double basin – perfect for war fleets and merchant ships alike. This natural advantage would shape the next two millennia of history.
The Appian Way: Rome’s Lifeline to the East
The Appian Way is one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of the ancient republic. It connected Rome to Brindisi, and its importance is indicated by its common name, recorded by the poet Statius, of Appia longarum regina viarum – “the Appian Way, queen of the long roads.”
Begun in 312 BC by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, the road originally ran 132 miles from Rome to Capua, but by about 244 BC it had been extended another 230 miles southeastward to reach the port of Brundisium, situated in the “heel” of Italy along the Adriatic Sea. This extension was the decisive act that transformed Brindisi from a regional port into one of the great hinges of the ancient world.
The Appian Way’s extension to Brindisi opened a vital route to the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, allowing Rome to move legions, supplies, and communication with unprecedented speed, paving the way, literally, for imperial expansion. Every Roman army heading to Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt or Persia began its journey here. Every dispatch from the eastern empire arrived here first. As National Geographic later put it, the Appia turned Brindisi into a global powerhouse, from which the Roman Army set off to expand its empire east to cities like Alexandria and Jerusalem, eventually ruling a quarter of the human population across three continents.
Brindisi was a crucial departure point for maritime routes to the Eastern Roman Empire, with the Appian Way serving military, economic, and cultural functions: it allowed Rome to maintain control over the southern provinces while facilitating the transport of troops and the exchange of goods and ideas across the empire.
The two magnificent Roman columns that stood at the top of the harbour staircase were the literal terminus of this 540-kilometre road: the last milestone of the known world before the sea.
In July 2024, the Via Appia was officially recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an acknowledgment of its historical, cultural, and architectural significance.
Julius Caesar and the Siege of Brundisium (49 BC)
Of all the episodes in Brindisi’s history, the most dramatically charged is the confrontation between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great in March 49 BC – the opening gambit of Rome’s catastrophic civil war.
The siege of Brundisium was an early military confrontation of Caesar’s Civil War. Taking place in March 49 BC, it saw the forces of Caesar’s Populares besiege the city, which was held by a force of Optimates under the command of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. After a series of brief skirmishes, during which Caesar tried to blockade the harbour, Pompey abandoned the city and managed to evacuate his men across the Adriatic to Epirus.
The blockade itself was a feat of engineering improvisation. Caesar took advantage of the shallowness of the port’s coastal waters and built new embankments along both sides of the entrance to the narrow harbour. The central part of the channel was too deep for this to work, so Caesar closed this gap with floating wooden structures topped with earth and defended with parapets and two-storey towers. Pompey responded by building large towers on merchant ships to fire down on Caesar’s engineers, halting Caesar’s progress.
It became a tense nine-day standoff, with Caesar simultaneously trying to negotiate. Caesar kept making attempts to win over Pompey, sending a series of messengers into the besieged city. Pompey’s answer was that he couldn’t make peace without the permission of the consuls, who were no longer present.
Then Pompey executed a masterly escape. He had all the gates to the city barred and built two fortified passageways leading to the port. When preparations were complete he ordered his men to quietly board the newly arrived ships under cover of these passageways, and posted lightly armed sentries on the walls to further cover his true intentions. The people of Brindisi – who appeared to take against Pompey – signalled Caesar when the evacuation began. Caesar’s men were able to capture two of Pompey’s ships that had run against the fortified mounds of dirt, but the rest of Pompey’s fleet successfully bypassed Caesar’s works and set a course for Dyrrachium in Greece.
Caesar was now faced with a considerable challenge: to end the war quickly, he had to follow Pompey immediately, but he did not have ships nearby. Instead he decided to attack Spain, where there were troops loyal to Pompey, thus beginning another stage of the civil war. Brindisi’s harbour had shaped the entire arc of the war.
The Treaty of Brundisium and the Road to Actium (40 BC)
Brindisi’s harbour witnessed another pivotal Roman drama a decade later. The city was attacked again in 40 BC, this time by Mark Antony, and then became the site of the accord known as the Treaty of Brundisium, between Antony and Octavian, to carve up the Roman Empire between themselves.
In September 40 BC, Mark Antony and Octavian met in Brundisium after a series of misunderstandings had brought them to the brink of a new civil war. When Antony arrived, Octavian’s soldiers and the citizens of Brundisium initially blocked him from entering the port. The stand-off was resolved diplomatically. The Treaty of Brundisium resolved their differences. A civil war was avoided, and Octavian offered the hand of his sister Octavia in marriage to Antony, which he accepted, bringing a period of goodwill between the two men.
That peace, as history records, proved fragile. Antony abandoned Octavia for Cleopatra, and the fragile triumvirate collapsed. In 32 BC, Octavius Caesar – soon to become Emperor Augustus – gathered his fleet in Brindisi’s port for the decisive campaign against Mark Antony and Cleopatra. It was from this same harbour that the forces assembled which would win the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and make Augustus the first emperor of Rome.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Brundisium
Brindisi earns a direct mention in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Antony and Cleopatra, most likely written and first performed in 1606, is the most geographically sweeping of Shakespeare’s plays; its setting is the entire Roman Empire and its backdrop is the well-documented history of Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavius Caesar.
The specific mention comes in Act III, Scene 7, set in Antony’s camp near Actium. Antony enters, visibly shaken by the speed of Octavius Caesar’s military advance. He says to his general Canidius: “Is it not strange, Canidius, / That from Tarentum and Brundusium / He could so quickly cut the Ionian Sea / And take in Toryne?” Cleopatra’s cool reply – that speed is never more admired than by the negligent – is a cutting rebuke, an ironic appreciation of efficiency by the inefficient.
The passage is historically precise: Octavian had indeed marshalled his forces from both Taranto and Brindisi for the Actium campaign. Shakespeare, drawing on Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Antonius, knew his Roman geography well. For an audience in 1606, those port names would have conjured the far edges of the known world; for us, walking the lungomare of modern Brindisi, it is a remarkable thing to stand at the very harbour from which those fleets departed.
The Death of Virgil (19 BC)
Brindisi also holds the melancholy distinction of being where Rome’s greatest poet breathed his last. Virgil had set out to revise the Aeneid with a planned three-year stay in Greece, but he became severely ill, and died in Brundisium on September 21, 19 BC.
He asked his friend Varius to burn the Aeneid if anything happened to him. Varius published them anyway, acting under the authority of Augustus. One of Western literature’s foundational works thus survived by imperial decree. Brindisi was the city where that story ended, and the poem began its immortal life.
The Crusades: Gateway to the Holy Land
After the fall of Rome, Brindisi passed through Ostrogoth, Byzantine, Lombard, Saracen and finally Norman hands. The Normans incorporated the city into the Principality of Taranto in 1071, and Brindisi became the base from which Crusaders left for the Holy Land, with wave after wave of crusading armies departing across the Adriatic.
During the First Crusade, Robert of Normandy and his forces sailed from here. Despite the first ship to leave port sinking almost immediately, resulting in around 400 deaths and a number of desertions, the majority of his fighting force made it safely to Dyrrachium and on to Constantinople.
Several crusaders sailed from Brindisi on 15 August 1227 for the Sixth Crusade. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II followed on 8 September with around 800 knights and 10,000 infantry, but fell ill and returned to southern Italy. He later successfully recovered Jerusalem through diplomacy rather than battle, the only crusader to do so.
In 1228, a castle was forged from the city’s ancient ruins to guard the port – the Castello Svevo, which survives to this day. A cathedral was also erected. Frederick II, the heir to the crown of Jerusalem, relaunched the city’s port as the departure point to the Holy Land.
Perhaps the most haunting Brindisi Crusader story involves the Children’s Crusade. A group of children arrived at the port of Brindisi on their way to the Middle East, asking for the local bishop’s blessing upon their crusade. He was intensely reluctant to grant it. The populace, virtually intoxicated by the children and their faith, demanded the blessing. He granted it under darkening skies. The children, singing joyfully, boarded the waiting ships and set sail, only for a terrible squall to blow up. Before the vessels had disappeared over the horizon, they foundered and sank. The composer Gian-Carlo Menotti made this tragedy the subject of one of his most powerful works, The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi.
Into the Modern Era
During the First World War, Brindisi was bombed approximately thirty times by enemy forces; from its port, Italian naval ships and submarines left for 207 missions of war. The city of was awarded the Bronze Medal of Military Valor (Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare) in recognition of service as a crucial naval base for the Allied forces in the lower Adriatic Sea during WWI
The building of the Suez Canal gave the city a huge commercial boost, with Brindisi becoming the starting point for the Indian Mail Route.
During the Fascist era there was great interest from Mussolini, to upgrade the port, as well as the city. The importance of its port meant that during the Second World War Brindisi was subject of aerial attacks from its enemies, suffering great structural and housing damage.
Towards its end, after secret negotiations with the Allies, the leaders of the Italian government, including King Vittorio Emanuele III and Prime Minister Badoglio, fled to Brindisi, which briefly served as Italy’s provisional capital.
In December 2019 more than 50,000 residents were evacuated from their homes following the discovery of an unexplored WW2 British bomb, believed to have been dropped on the city in 1941.
The Armistice and the Flight from Rome
The story of Brindisi’s Second World War role begins with one of the most consequential (and most controversial) decisions of the Italian war. By the summer of 1943, Mussolini had been toppled, the Allies had invaded Sicily, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s government was secretly negotiating surrender. The Armistice of Cassibile was signed on 3 September 1943, kept secret from the public and from most of the Italian military until Eisenhower announced it on 8 September.
The announcement triggered immediate German retaliation. German troops, following the pre-planned Operation Achse, quickly disarmed Italian forces and took over critical defensive positions across the country. Rome itself was under threat. In the early hours of 9 September, the King and his government made a decision that would haunt Italy’s post-war political memory. King Victor Emmanuel III, Marshal Badoglio, and a group of generals and admirals including Joint Chief of Staff Ambrosio and Army Chief of Staff Roatta left Rome by automobile in great haste at 5 a.m., proceeding to the Adriatic port of Pescara and onward to Brindisi.
The retreat was not well received. Unfavourable comparisons were drawn with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who refused to leave London during the Blitz, and Pope Pius XII, who mixed with Rome’s crowds after the city’s working-class neighbourhood of San Lorenzo was destroyed by Allied bombing. The Italian troops left behind, without instructions, without leadership, quickly collapsed before the German advance.
The “Kingdom of the South”: Italy’s Government in Exile at Brindisi
Between September 1943 and February 1944, Brindisi functioned as Italy’s temporary government seat, hosting King Victor Emmanuel III, Pietro Badoglio, and a part of the Italian armed forces command. This improvised state became known in Italian historiography as the Regno del Sud – the Kingdom of the South.
It was, in every practical sense, a government under siege — not outwith its borders, but from the complexity of its own legitimacy. The Brindisi administration controlled only five provinces of Italy with a population of around two million people, including three army divisions, an insignificant air force and some naval personnel, while the bulk of the country remained under German control. Almost all of Badoglio’s civilian ministries had remained trapped in Rome.
Yet Brindisi’s importance to the Allies was precisely its legitimacy. For the Allies, it was necessary that in liberated Italy there was a government capable of exercising legitimate power to counter that of the Italian Social Republic established by Mussolini at Salò. By October 1943, authority in the liberated provinces of Taranto, Lecce, Brindisi and Bari was ceded to the Badoglio government, under the oversight of an Allied Commission directed by Noel Mason-McFarlane, former British governor of Gibraltar.
One of the first acts of the Brindisi government was historically significant: the signing of the so-called “long armistice,” integrating the short armistice signed at Cassibile on 3 September, under which Italy committed to unconditional surrender while the Allies committed to softening conditions in proportion to Italian assistance against Germany. The amended armistice protocol was formally signed at Brindisi on 9 November 1943.
On 13 October, a further milestone: Italy formally declared war on Germany, the declaration signed by Victor Emmanuel III and transmitted to Berlin through the Italian Embassy in Madrid. The country that had begun the war as a German ally was now a co-belligerent fighting alongside its former enemies.
In February 1944, the government moved to Salerno, which became the next provisional capital, as the Allied front pushed northward. Brindisi’s role as seat of government was thus brief — September 1943 to February 1944.
The Strategic Port: Operation Slapstick and the Allied Capture
Brindisi’s capture by the Allies had itself been a model of swift, improvised opportunism. The Italian government had offered to open the ports of Taranto and Brindisi to the Allies, and British airborne troops of the 1st Airborne Division, arriving by sea from North Africa due to a shortage of transport aircraft, seized both ports in working order. Taranto fell on 9 September; two days later, British paratroopers captured Brindisi. The port’s infrastructure – critically – was intact. Had the Germans destroyed it, the entire Allied logistics chain up the Adriatic coast would have been crippled.
From Brindisi, the British 1st Airborne Division then advanced some 125 miles northward to capture the Foggia airfield complex, a prize of enormous strategic value that placed Allied bombers within range of Romanian oil fields and southern German industrial targets.
RAF Brindisi: Churchill’s Secret Air Bridge
Perhaps the least-known but most operationally fascinating chapter of Brindisi’s war was its role as the launching pad for Churchill’s secret war behind enemy lines. After the port’s capture, RAF Brindisi became one of the most important clandestine air bases in the entire European theatre.
Late in 1943, the SOE – Britain’s Special Operations Executive – established its Balkans operations base at Bari in southern Italy, with the codename “Force 133.” Flights from Brindisi were run to the Balkans and Poland, particularly once operational control had been transferred directly to SOE headquarters rather than Cairo.
No. 148 (Special Duties) Squadron RAF moved to Brindisi in 1944, flying Halifax bombers and Liberators on missions dropping supplies to partisans in southern France, Italy, the Balkans and Poland. Working closely with the SOE, the squadron also parachuted agents to various locations across occupied Europe. The Imperial War Museum holds photographs of Yugoslav partisans at Brindisi airfield loading supply containers onto Halifax bombers before night missions into the mountains.
The RAF and Polish special duties units formally moved to Brindisi in December 1943 and January 1944. Supplies were kept in warehouses at Brindisi, an area known as “Paradise Camp”, where partisans, many of them evacuees who had come to Italy for medical care, packed the supplies each morning according to field requests. The cargoes ranged from guns and ammunition to food, medical supplies, jeeps – and on at least one occasion, mules.
After the invasion of Italy, the OSS – America’s intelligence service – established a communications station at Brindisi when Bari became inadequate for certain operations. Brindisi also hosted a parachute school staffed by British and American instructors, through which Italian agents were trained before being dropped into occupied northern Italy.
The port city that had sent crusaders to Jerusalem in the 11th century, and Caesar’s legions to the east in the 1st century BC, was once again in 1943-44 a place where men prepared themselves for dangerous journeys into unknown territory, this time, over the moonlit Adriatic and the dark ridges of Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania.
A Footnote on King Victor Emmanuel and History’s Verdict
The question of whether the King’s flight to Brindisi was cowardice or prudent statecraft has never been fully resolved in Italian historical memory. The sympathetic reading – that he had to preserve legitimate government, that Hitler had planned his arrest, that Brindisi gave the Allies a functioning Italian counterweight to Mussolini’s Salò Republic – carries genuine weight. Hitler had indeed planned to arrest Victor Emmanuel shortly after Mussolini’s overthrow.
The harsher reading is that the King had enabled Fascism for twenty years, allowed the armistice negotiations to be kept secret from the very military commanders who needed to know, and then fled at the moment Italy needed him most — leaving hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers to be disarmed and deported to German labour camps. His reputation never recovered. He abdicated in 1946, his son Umberto II reigned for a single month, and Italy voted to become a republic.
Brindisi, for those few months, was both the stage for this ambiguous final act of the Italian monarchy and the genuine logistical heart of the Allied southern campaign. The harbour that had shaped Roman civil wars, Crusader embarkations and Shakespearean drama had, one final time, found itself at the hinge of history.
For the visitor standing today at the top of the Scalinata Virgiliana, looking out past the single Roman column to the harbour beyond, the full weight of that history is palpable: the legions of Rome, the fleets of Caesar and Antony, the crusader armies, the poet who died here, the children who drowned here — all funnelled through this single pronged inlet on the heel of Italy that the Messapians named, with accidental poetry, for the branching antlers of a stag.
Brindisi by the Puglia Guys
What we love
Authenticity and lack of crowds. The refreshing absence of mass tourism is obvious. Italian visitors consistently describe it as a city “suspended in time, without traffic or crowds” – where many attractions are free. Italians who are weary of over-touristed Italian destinations prize this, “Brindisi is the most beautiful place in the world because it’s not overrun by tourists.”
The waterfront and port atmosphere. The Lungomare Regina Margherita is one of Puglia’s finest. The tourist port area well-kept, open and welcoming, with restaurants along the palm-lined promenade and a clear view of the Alfonsino fortress on the water. Sunset strolls here are a recurring highlight.
Food and value for money. Like all Italian visitors, we are emphatic about the quality of fresh seafood. Crudi di mare, sea urchin pasta (ricci), grilled octopus, cozze (mussels) and local orecchiette with cime di rapa appear again and again. Brindisi is seen as synonymous with sea cuisine and Mediterranean atmosphere. The lungomare restaurants serve fresh catch, raw seafood, risotto and frutti di mare, while city osterie celebrate Puglia’s homestyle cooking traditions, with orecchiette, ricotta and local olive oil.
History at no cost. The city is compact and walkable, with many major monuments including the Archaeological Museum, Roman ruins and the Granafei Nervegna Palace available free of charge.
Rising interest. In 2024 Brindisi ranked 17th among the most-searched destinations by Italian travellers, with demand up 76% versus 2023 – a remarkable jump that reflects growing Italian curiosity about their own underexplored south.
What could be better
Inconsistency in restaurants. Italian diners hold local restaurants to a high standard, and the reviews are not uniformly glowing. Several note variable quality — a dish of fresh fish praised one visit, poorly prepared the next.
The Svevo Castle frustration. The Castello Svevo (Castello di Terra) is in a military zone and effectively inaccessible – a significant source of disappointment given how striking it looks from photographs.
Sunday dead zones. Multiple Italian bloggers note that many restaurants and cultural sites have limited Sunday hours or don’t open until mid-afternoon, catching visitors off guard.
A city that divides opinion. Some visitors, especially those arriving after Ostuni or Monopoli, find it underwhelming on first impression. It doesn’t have the same photogenic alleyways. Don’t come here seeking the instagrammable exploration that Puglia’s other towns deliver. The counter-voice is that this rawness is its greatest quality.
Where Italians eat in Brindisi
If you have come armed with TripAdvisor restaurant recommendations, be aware that when selecting somewhere to eat, international visitors choose restaurants based on rather different values from Italian tourists. These are less rooted in culinary tradition, and have more to do with atmosphere and experience.
So we’ve included a list of Brindisi’s favourite restaurants, as frequented by Italian visitors and those familiar with the local food culture, with a sharper focus on ingredients, tradition and value.
Brindisi’s undisputed dining institution. A Michelin-listed trattoria steps from the port, celebrated for its antipasto buffet and fresh fish cooked mainly on the grill. The Gambero Rosso 2025 guide singles it out for its traditional and seasonal menu inspired by both sea and land, including local specialities like laganari di semola alle vongole and fresh Adriatic catch. High marks from Italian diners for the antipasto degustazione. Book ahead.
One of the top-rated restaurants on among Italian users for both seafood and traditional cuisine, and frequently cited as the most romantic option in the city.
Praised for its terrace and creative take on traditional Puglia dishes. Popular for both atmosphere and cuisine.
Diecimiglia Hosteria Contemporanea
The choice for contemporary Puglia cooking with a more modern sensibility. Strong on vegetarian options too.
A well-regarded restaurant in the city centre known for celebrating local culinary traditions, with specialities including orecchiette con cime di rapa, seafood risotto and tagliata di manzo. High repeat visit rate among Italian diners.
Directly overlooking the port, the name comes from an ancient fishing trap – so it should be no surprise that the specialities are crudi, frittura and fresh catch, alongside pizza. Frequently noted as a favourite of local VIPs passing through Brindisi. Lively, harbour-facing terrace.
A newer arrival that has quickly built a loyal Italian following. Among the most-visited romantic seafood restaurants in Brindisi , with Italian reviewers praising the quality and intimacy.
Italian regulars return year after year for its warm and friendly service. Known for its panoramic terrace, pizza, fish, cured meats (including Capocollo di Martina Franca) and a well-curated wine list with the best local rosés and reds.
Nove Radici – Esperienza Gastronomica Pugliese
Among the most appreciated pizzerias in Brindisi, but with a broader mission: celebrating Puglia’s gastronomic roots. Italian reviewers highlight the quality of ingredients and the regional identity of the menu.
A good option for a more informal evening with a focus on raw and cooked seafood with an aperitivo culture.
In addition, these local favourites are where return to.
Not included, but one of the places we enjoy eating at in Brindisi is Situated in a narrow street leading down from Piazza Duomo to the lungomare. Large interior area in addition to outside seating. Great for seafood. Friendly staff and the selection of starters offers great value.
Popular pizzerie, and a local favourite.
Betty – Gelateria Café Ristorante Pizzeria
Something of an institution! For morning coffee, pastries or afternoon gelato.
Things to Do & See in Brindisi
The Roman Column and Virgil’s Staircase
At the top of a broad white staircase overlooking the inner harbour stands a single Roman column: the last milestone of the Via Appia, one of the most travelled roads in human history.
Originally two columns stood here, marking the formal terminus of the 540-kilometre road from Rome. In 1528, one collapsed. The ruins were eventually gifted in 1666 to the city of Lecce, where the capital was repurposed as the base for a statue of Sant’Oronzo, Lecce’s patron saint, traditionally credited with saving Brindisi from plague. Lecce keeps it to this day.
The surviving column was dismantled during the Second World War as a precaution against bomb damage, reassembled afterwards, then taken down again between 1996 and 2002 for full restoration and archaeological investigation of the surrounding square. It has stood again, uninterrupted, ever since.
The staircase below it takes its name – the Scalinata Virgiliana – from the Latin poet Virgil, who lodged in a house on this very square and died here in 19 BC on his return from Greece, his Aeneid still unfinished. The house is long gone, replaced by a later palazzo, but a plaque marks the location. The steps themselves date from 1861, enlarged and dramatised during the Fascist era in 1929 into the sweeping horizontal panorama that visitors see today, designed to be read as a grand theatrical backdrop by ships arriving from the east.
Stand here at dusk, with the column above you and the harbour below, and it is not difficult to understand why this spot has drawn travellers for two thousand years. Iconic.
The Monument to the Italian Sailor
On the far side of the port, impossible to miss and impossible to ignore, stands one of Brindisi’s most arresting and complicated landmarks. The Monument to the Italian Sailor (Il Monumento al Marinaio d’Italia) rises 53 metres above the waterfront in reinforced concrete, its surface clad in pietra carparo, the warm beige sandstone of the Salento, which gives the structure its distinctive golden glow against the Adriatic sky.
Commissioned by Mussolini and built between 1932 and 1933, it was conceived in the full architectural vocabulary of Italian Fascism: monumental, uncompromising, designed to overwhelm. The form is that of a ship’s rudder; its base an overturned hull, inside which a crypt houses an altar to the Virgin, Stella Maris (Star of the Sea).
Whatever one makes of its origins, the monument carries genuine weight. Set into the arches flanking its entrance are panels of black marble inscribed with the names of approximately 6,000 men, sailors of the Italian Navy and Merchant Navy who died in service from Italian unification through to the monument’s inauguration, the great majority of them in the First World War. To stand and read those names is to understand that the structure, whatever its political parentage, is also a place of real grief.
The Brindisi locals have always seen through the official grandeur to something more domestic. They call it simply la jatta ’ssittata, in the local dialect, “the seated cat.”
The Francesco Ribezzo Archaeological Museum
If Brindisi’s streets offer only glimpses of its layered past, the Francesco Ribezzo Archaeological Museum on Piazza del Duomo makes the full depth of that history legible. Named after the Brindisi-born archaeologist and linguist who dedicated his career to recovering this region’s ancient voices, the museum is one of the finest in Puglia.
Begin in the Portico of the Knights Templar, where bronze anchor stocks, sarcophagi and honorary steles set the maritime tone immediately. The ground floor Antiquities Section moves through ceramics, bronzes, terracotta votives and coins gathered from local excavations, offering a vivid cross-section of the cultures that once competed for this harbour. The standout here is the Sala Marzano, dedicated to the Messapian civilisation, Puglia’s pre-Roman inhabitants, whose trozzella vases, with their intricate wheel-spoke handles, are among the most distinctive objects in the region.
Upstairs, the red-figure vases of the Prehistoric and Greek sections include remarkable pieces by the Hephaestus Painter and a depiction of Triptolemus on his winged chariot, evidence of the cultural exchange that the port made possible. The Roman section on the second floor deepens the story further, with statuary, coins and a particularly affecting funerary stele of Clodia Anthianilla, a local scholar of the Roman period whose memorial stone survives here almost two thousand years after her death.
The museum’s final and perhaps most extraordinary room is devoted to underwater archaeology. The Bronzi di Punta del Serrone, recovered from the seabed off Brindisi in 1992, include fragments of ancient bronze statuary: haunting, barnacled remnants of ships lost in the very harbour below the museum’s windows. Nearby amphorae and anchor stocks complete a picture of a port in constant, restless motion across the millennia.
Entry is free. Allow at least ninety minutes, and more if you want to linger, which you will.
We took a deep dive into Puglia’s Greek and Roman history – read our full account of a visit to the Francesco Ribezzo Archaeological Museum.
Piazza del Duomo — Considered the most beautiful square in the city, surrounded by the Cathedral, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Seminary and the Archaeological Museum, all clustered around a single spectacular space.
The Lungomare Regina Margherita — The palm-lined seafront promenade, best at golden hour. Bars, restaurant terraces and harbour views of the Alfonsino fortress across the water.
Castello Alfonsino (Castello di Mare) — Built by Alfonso of Aragon in the mid-1400s on a small island in the outer harbour, it takes on a magnificent reddish glow at sunset. Guided visits by reservation only (€8).
Tempio di San Giovanni al Sepolcro — A beautiful circular Romanesque building designed to replicate the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, allowing pilgrims who couldn’t travel to the Holy Land to make a virtual pilgrimage.
Chiesa di Santa Maria del Casale — A remarkable example of Gothic-Romanesque architecture just outside the centre, with medieval frescoes inside. A short drive from town (near the airport).
Palazzo Granafei Nervegna — A free exhibition space in the historic centre, home to one of the original Roman column capitals. Open daily.
Area Archeologica di San Pietro degli Schiavoni — Fascinating remains of an ancient Roman neighbourhood, directly beneath the modern Teatro Verdi. Free.
Day trips by train — Lecce is just 30 minutes away, Monopoli about 45, Taranto a little over an hour-and the train station is very walkable from the centre — making Brindisi an excellent hub for exploring southern Puglia without a car for those legs.
Torre Guaceto Nature Reserve — A protected coastal nature reserve about 20 minutes’ drive from Brindisi , with dunes, clear water and walking trails. One of the least-crowded stretches of the Adriatic coast.
| The bottom line for your trip: Brindisi deserves more than a transit stop. It won’t deliver Instagrammable baroque grandeur like Lecce, but Italian food lovers and those seeking an authentic, unhurried port city will find it genuinely rewarding – especially for a half-day or overnight stop en route south to Gallipoli. |
