Piazza del Ferrarese in Bari seen from Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, with the arcades of the Spazio Murat
Piazza del Ferrarese is the threshold between the nineteenth-century Murat district and Bari's old town: this frame shows it from Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, with the traffic light and the pedestrian-area sign marking the boundary beyond which the city can only be crossed on foot. The square began as the southern extension of piazza Mercantile and in the seventeenth century was still a small parade ground serving the guard post; at its centre, level with today's strada Vallisa, stood one of the gates in the city walls built under Philip III of Spain, designed to ease the movement of goods towards the market. The foundations of that gate and the original paving stones of the road survive in the excavation left open in the middle of the square. The present name appears in the eighteenth century and historians attribute it either to Girolamo Barucchelli, a native of Ferrara who owned property here, or to the ironsmith Stefano Fabbri, who built the neoclassical arcade. On the left stands the Spazio Murat, the old market building designed by Giuseppe Gimma in 1817, later demolished and rebuilt, and today a venue dedicated to art, architecture and research; the arcaded fronts closing the other sides belong to the former Fish Market, built by Vincenzo Capirri in 1837 and raised to two floors by 1903, and to Palazzo Traversa, built by Francesco De Giglio in 1914. Entirely pedestrian today, the square is the city's drawing room and the heart of its nightlife.
