History
A Catholic History of San Giovanni Rotondo
San Giovanni Rotondo began as a stop on the pilgrim road to Saint Michael's cave and became, after 1916, the town of Padre Pio: the friary where he received the wounds of Christ, the confessional, the Prayer Groups and the hospital he built.
Before 1500
The pilgrim road to Saint Michael
For about a thousand years San Giovanni Rotondo was a station on the road to the cave of Saint Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo, 19 kilometers to the east. The Lombard princes of Benevento made that cave their national shrine, and their pilgrims climbed the Gargano plateau on a route the Capuchins now call the Via Sacra Langobardorum, the Lombard sacred way.
The town takes its name from a round church of Saint John the Baptist, the Rotonda east of the old town. By tradition it is an early Christian baptistery of the 6th or 7th century, but no excavation report or scholarly dating was found, so the date is tradition. By the 13th century the town was walled and had a dozen small churches, among them Sant'Onofrio, founded around 1231, and in the 15th century pilgrims from the Marche on their way to the Archangel built a chapel to Our Lady of Loreto outside the walls.