New Year's Eve Brindisi

If you are in Apulia and you want a bit of movement for the New Year night, you can be lucky in the beautiful city of Brindisi.
Its position is really amazing: it is located in a suggestive natural inlet, which has always assured the role as the main port in the Adriatic sea.
It is not a case that here ends the long Via Appia: in fact, already in Roman times, Brindisi was one of the most important harbours of all the Mediterranean.
Brindisi had several historical vicissitudes, including a very serious epidemic plague, and a terrible earthquake, but despite this, for a period it was the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and precisely from September 1943 to February 1944.
We start our visit of the historical centre, placed on a small promontory, from the fabulous Duomo (cathedral), entirely in Romanesque style, except for the facade of 1700.
The Duomo is situated in the Duomo square where, in the past, you could admire two Roman columns, which showed the point where ended the Via Appia: only one column has survived.
Yet in the Duomosquare there is the Knights Templare porch, or at least what is left of this great building of the XIVth century.
Within the Knights porch, we can admire the wonderful Francesco Ribrezzo Provincial Archeological Museum.
In the immediate vicinity of the museum, we find the Saint Mary of the Angels church, dating back to 1600: on the entry door of the Church we see the arms of the Dukes of Lorraine, which financed the construction of the church.
Very interesting, finally, is the Svevo castle, that it has been restored many times along the centuries.
The Castle, built by the wishes of Federico II, has a very interesting structure: it is characterised, in fact, by the enormous sqaured towers that surround a building with a trapezoid structure.