Foggia

Foggia sits on the Tavoliere plain, the flat grain and pasture land of Capitanata. Frederick II made it a favourite residence and built an imposing palace there, with a fishpond remembered in the name of Via Pescheria; Charles I of Anjou died in the city in January 1285. Its centre was fixed by sheep. Under the Aragonese kings Foggia became the seat of the Dogana delle pecore, the customs house and tribunal that regulated winter pasture on the Tavoliere and taxed the flocks coming down from the Abruzzi in the great seasonal migration.

The tax was the largest revenue of the whole kingdom, and it filled the royal treasury, but it impoverished the farmers of the plain, who abandoned their land until it turned to marsh. The Dogana first met in a fifteenth-century palace beside the cathedral and moved to a new building in the eighteenth century. In 1480 Foggia hosted the general parliament of the Aragonese kingdom. On 20 March 1731 an earthquake destroyed a third of the houses and badly damaged the city's churches and convents; rebuilding began within months, and the poor settled the free ground in long rows of huts. The Dogana was abolished by the French in 1806, and Foggia became a provincial capital the same year.