Bari's position made it. On the Adriatic, facing the Balkans and beyond them Constantinople, it was a Byzantine city for centuries — the seat of the catepano , the Byzantine governor of southern Italy — before the Normans took it.

In 1087 sailors from Bari removed the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra in Asia Minor and brought them here. The Basilica di San Nicola was built to hold them, and it made the city a pilgrimage destination for both Latin and Orthodox Christians — a status it still holds, and one reason Bari has a standing in the Orthodox world that few Italian cities share.

The old city, Bari Vecchia , is the medieval town on its peninsula: dense, inward-turning, built as a defensive knot. The Murat quarter beside it is the opposite — a rigid nineteenth-century grid laid out under Napoleonic rule, which is where the modern city's commercial life sits.

The administrative history matters as much as the architecture. The historic province of Terra di Bari covered central Puglia south of the Ofanto, reaching as far as Fasano and Cisternino. For centuries its capital was Trani, not Bari — Bari supplanted it only in 1806 .

After unification the province was confirmed and divided into the circondari of Bari delle Puglie, Barletta and Altamura. In 1927 , when the circondari were abolished, Cisternino and Fasano were transferred to the new province of Brindisi. In 2004 the province of Barletta-Andria-Trani was created, taking Andria, Barletta, Trani, Bisceglie, Canosa di Puglia, Minervino Murge and Spinazzola out of Bari province. And on 31 December 2014 the province of Bari was itself suppressed, replaced the next day by the Città metropolitana.