Japigia, Bari — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Japigia?

Viale Japigia is the axis everything else hangs on. The street gave the quarter its name and carried the first houses, built in the 1940s, and the oldest zone still goes by Japigia Zona Vecchia. Sport fills the middle.

The Palaflorio and the Polivalente stand among the public housing of the zone called Japigia 45, built from the 1960s at a high density. Villas take the southern end. Modern private blocks and houses fill the parts furthest from the centre, which makes the quarter three quite different places rather than one.

What is the history of Japigia?

The name reaches back to the second millennium before Christ. The Iapigi, an Indo-European people probably of Illyrian origin, held almost all of present Puglia until the fourth century before Christ, and the Greeks gave them the name, linking it to Iapyx, son of Daedalus and the first founder of Bari. A street carried the name forward.

Viale Japigia was laid as the main axis of the first houses in the 1940s and took the ancient name of the region. Building followed the city outward. The second half of the twentieth century pushed the original nucleus steadily south as Bari expanded, and by 1952, seven years after the war, housing worth more than two billion lire had gone up with as much again under way.

The whole intervention ran past six and a half billion lire. That was a considerable figure for the time, and it is what produced the dense public housing the quarter is known for.

Where is Japigia?

Japigia lies about a kilometre south-east of the Bari centre in the first municipio, between Madonnella and San Pasquale to the north, Carbonara di Bari to the east and San Giorgio and Sant'Anna to the south.