GRAND HOTEL VIGNA NOCELLI - LUCERA

Resort with 52 Classic rooms and 13 suites of which 4 are reserved to the individuals with disabilitises in a perfect union between antiquity and modernity. Wellness area is dedicated to health and beauty. Outside swimming pool for your relax. Meeting rooms. The Grand Hotel Vigna Nocelli lies on the Appia Traiana the most important Daunias arterial road since the Roman Age. It was the first military road realised by the Ancient Romans in the year 312 before Christ but it was only in 109 b.C. that this road was settled and declared public by the Emperor Trajan from whom it took its name it became the most important arterial road through which Rome assured itself the dominion on the Campania region and furthermore it determined a larger commercial transit to all the towns situated on its way. Even if during the Medieval Age little attention was paid to the routes maintenance they were highly used by lots of people travelling mainly for religious reasons in the age of the Great Pilgrimages. The most used road was the Francigena or Francesca inevitable route for all the pilgrims who wanted to go to Rome. The Grand Hotel Vigna Nocelli is situated on the Traiana Diverticulum that from Aecae led to the ancient Sipontum. During the 12th century this part of the Via Francigena took the name of Strada Peregrinorum because it was an essential passage for all the pilgrims going to or coming back the Holy Land. Vigna Nocelli was built between the 13th and 14th centuries the age during which started in Italy the diffusion of the Gothic forms developed in the French region Ile de France. The most important event for the affirmation of the new gothic tendencies in the south of Italy has been the great artistic and cultural movement that grew during the Swabian age and that spread also in northern Italy mainly in Tuscany where the gothic style was revised. The Grand Hotel Vigna Nocelli external faade consists of three parts : the central one is developed vertically and reminds the Orvieto Cathedrals tricuspidate faade 1310 the lateral parts are both comprised between two pilasters surmounted by spires. The continuity of the tall and strong external wall is broken by five great portals and by the string-course that divide horizontally the building in the middle of the faades highest part there is a circular decoration. Further garnishments are the vegetable and floral decorations harmoniously placed in the pointed arches that give a more slander aspect to the building and that remind us the pointed arches used to adorn the Italian works of the 13th-14th centuries. The building is structurally built with a strong bearing masonry that is not dry-stone but seems made up of bricks and stones while the vaults are made of bricks the walls are 95 centimetres thick.