As part of the European Heritage Days on 26 and 27 September 2026, this year devoted to the theme Protecting Heritage: Renewing, Resisting, Reinventing, the State Archives of Bari, in collaboration with MU.TE.C. – the Museum of the Territory of Cassano and the Alta Murgia, the Municipality of Cassano delle Murge, and the Polytechnic University of Bari, is organising a documentary exhibition to mark the centenary of the 1926 flood. The third major flood to strike Bari in the twentieth century, it devastated the city and prompted a series of measures that included the creation of the Mercadante Forest in the Alta Murgia.
The centenary offers an opportunity to revisit a significant chapter in Bari’s twentieth-century history. Following the disaster, the area underwent major changes through measures designed to protect, reshape and make the territory safer.
Through documents, photographs, maps and plans, the exhibition recounts both the devastation caused by the flood and the response developed over the following years. It conveys the scale of the tragedy and its impact on the population and the surrounding area, while tracing the measures taken to address hydrogeological instability and reshape the relationship between people and their environment.
One particularly significant initiative undertaken after the flood was the large-scale afforestation of the Alta Murgia. The Mercadante Forest was created to help retain rainwater during exceptional storms. Its history shows how a severe natural disaster can prompt broader reflection on land management and lead to measures with lasting effects on the landscape and environment. The exhibition therefore gives considerable attention to the decisions behind the forest’s creation and to the role of the Terra di Bari’s drainage network, of which the lame—the area’s natural drainage channels—are an integral part.
The exhibition recovers an important part of collective memory and helps explain the search for new strategies of prevention and protection. It also invites reflection on the broader meaning of protecting heritage: safeguarding documentary records, the landscape and the territory. Knowing what happened, understanding the responses it prompted and preserving their traces are concrete forms of prevention and responsibility towards the future.
Professor Michele Mossa gave a presentation on the history of flooding in Bari.
1
Download the article of the newspaper La Repubblica Bari (in Italian).
LIC - Coastal Engineering Laboratory
