The Greeks are said to have called this place Sidion , the land of pomegranates, and the Romans Silvium , the land of woods. The modern name is usually explained by the ravine itself, though tradition prefers a phrase attributed to Frederick II — Grana dat et vina , it gives grain and wine — from which Gravina is said to derive. The ancient settlement lay on the hill of Botromagno , with the archaeological site known as the Padre Eterno below it.

The town's own origin is a refugee story, and it is written into the rock. The church of San Michele delle Grotte , in the rione Fondovico , was excavated out of a single block of tufa between the eighth and tenth centuries : five naves carried on fourteen natural quadrangular pillars, with Byzantine frescoes. It was, in the local account, the mother church of the refugees , who built their dwellings around it and so brought Gravina into being. Inside it are skulls and bones which tradition assigns to the victims of the Saracen massacre of the Gravinesi in 999 .

Around it lie some eighty rupestrian sites in the ravine — among them the grotta delle sette camere , the crypt of San Vito Vecchio , the Sepulcreto, and the rock sanctuary of the Madonna della Stella , which became a Marian sanctuary in the 1500s and takes its name from a fresco of the Madonna and Child with a star on her forehead.

Above ground, Frederick II built the Castello Svevo as a hunting lodge, the country then being wooded. The cathedral was built in 1065 , almost entirely destroyed by the earthquake of 1456 , and rebuilt from 1482 under Bishop Matteo D'Aquino , supported by the citizens and financed by Duke Francesco II Orsini — the design has been attributed to Bramante . It is now a basilica minore dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta : three naves on columns whose capitals are all different, with polychrome marble altars of the early eighteenth century.

The town's emblem is its bridge, and its history is a lesson in reading dates carefully. The Ponte Acquedotto Madonna della Stella crosses the ravine — anciently the Crapo — ninety metres long, thirty-seven high, five and a half wide. It was built to let the faithful reach the rock sanctuary on the far side. Its original construction date is unknown, but a notarial act proves it existed by 1686 . Destabilised by the earthquake of that year, it probably came down in the 1722 quake. The Orsini then rebuilt it, and did something more than rebuild: they turned it into a true aqueduct , carrying water from the springs of Sant'Angelo and San Giacomo to under the city walls. The double-arcade structure was begun in 1743 and completed in 1778 — the same year as the Quattro Fontane monument, raised to bring water into the town from the Pozzo Pateo spring.

The Orsini left other marks. Santa Maria del Suffragio , the church of the Purgatorio, was built between 1649 and 1654 as the family's funerary chapel. And the Biblioteca Finya , one of the oldest libraries in Puglia, holds more than eight thousand volumes.

One institution predates all of it. The Fiera di San Giorgio , held in April, was restored by Charles of Anjou in 1294 at the instance of the count of Montfort, and Gravina claims it as the oldest fair in the world. It still opens with a historical cortege re-enacting the ceremonies that began the market.