Vieste is among the oldest towns of the Daunia — a Greek colony and then a Roman municipium , with its greatest period under Diocletian. The name is disputed: one well-supported derivation ties it to fire and to Vesta , goddess of the hearth, through the Etruscan Apheneste and the Latin ustum .

Its early medieval history is bound to another town. Merino , a few kilometres up the coast, was destroyed in 914 , and its survivors and its cult passed to Vieste — which is why the patron of a town on this headland is the Madonna of a city that no longer stands.

Byzantines, Lombards and Normans followed. In 1002 the Venetian Doge Pietro II Orseolo put in at Vieste with his fleet on his way to relieve Bari from a Saracen siege — a reminder that this coast faced east long before it faced Rome. The Norman and Swabian centuries gave the town the shape it still has: the castle , the cathedral and the medieval centre of narrow lanes, white houses and steep stairs cut into the cliff. Frederick II attended to both castle and cathedral after damage sustained during the crusade of Pope Gregory IX. The Castello Svevo , triangular in plan on the Punta San Francesco, was Norman in origin and massively enlarged in the thirteenth century.

Then the sea turned against it. In 1447 the Turk Acomat Pascià sacked and destroyed Vieste; it was rebuilt by Antonio Miro Gallo with the help of his feudatories.

A century later came the event the town has never stopped commemorating. On 18 July 1554 — by one account driven in by a violent storm rather than arriving on a planned expedition, and finding the town in the middle of a festival — Dragut Rais , lieutenant of Barbarossa and admiral of Suleiman's fleet, anchored seventy galleys off the rock of Sant'Eugenia and the point of the Corno, and fired nine hundred and seventy cannon shots at the walls and the castle.

The Viestani shut the gates and organised an armed defence; the townspeople took refuge in the cathedral and the castle . The governor sent word to the provincial authorities, who did nothing. Only Nicolantonio Dentice, lord of Monte Sant'Angelo , came to help with the men he had, and he was mortally wounded. Vieste held out seven days , largely on the cannon fire of the castle garrison.

On the seventh day the gates were opened from inside. The traitor is named in the local sources as Nerbis , brother of the camerlengo who held the keys; he went to Dragut seeking terms — that the citizens be allowed to leave with their gold and silver — and opened the gates. Dragut's men came straight in.

What followed is recorded by the eighteenth-century Viestano writer Vincenzo Giuliani . The corsairs sacked the town, took the men to sell as slaves, and had the old people, the women and the children who could not be sold brought to a rock beside the cathedral and beheaded. That rock is the Chianca Amara — the bitter stone in Viestano dialect — and it still stands between via Cimaglia, via Gregorio XIII and the vicolo that bears its name. The figure usually given is about five thousand .

The town rebuilt again. The Concattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta is a three-naved Romanesque basilica, heavily remade in the eighteenth century, its bell tower rebuilt in Baroque form after a collapse in 1772 ; inside is a fifteenth-century wooden statue of the Madonna di Merino . The convent church of San Francesco was destroyed by the Turks more than once. Il Seggio , in the old town, was the seat of the former municipality and carries a large sundial. The castle was damaged again by Venetian incursions and in the First World War, and is now used by the Marina Militare .