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The mosaics of San Giusto were found in the homonymous locality, located a few kilometers south-east of the town. Between 1990 and 1995 works were carried out on the Celone Torrent dam in order to create a dam; within the site area an archaeological area related to a late Roman and unknown Palechristian settlement emerged.
The archaeological excavations, which took place between 1995 and 1997 by the Superintendence of the Apulia Region and the University of Bari, covered an area of about 4,000 m² and brought to light an important rural settlement of late Roman and Palechristian age. The archaeological deposit consists of artifacts belonging to different chronological phases, and has an incredible overlap of interventions, covering a period of about eight centuries in which the area was inhabited: from the first century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.
The overlapping of the artifacts allows to identify a first settlement nucleus, dating back to the period between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D., and consists of a rural villa. The period from the 1st to the 6th century A.D. dates back to a large villa with both residential and productive characteristics, with rooms decorated with mosaics and wine production facilities with press, fermentation tanks and sunken containers for storage. Of the first half of the fifth century A.D. is then an early Christian basilica with three naves, apse and narthex plan connected to a circular external baptistery; To this building belong the mosaics kept inside the structure made in the gardens of the Former Convent of the SS Salvatore.
These mosaics (500 sqm) decorated the entire floor inside the church and evident evidence of the value and role of the center of San Giusto at the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.The mosaic floor shows several geometric patterns of the Adriatic, North African and Greek influence with concentric circles and turns in the central nave, rhombus, knots, lozenges, Greek crosses in the side aisles, and a precious circular emblem decorating the presbytery area. Between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the sixth century A.D. the original church was flanked to the west by a "twin" building, thus defining a "double church" system, used for funerary functions, as evidenced by about 70 tombs with furnishings found on site. The complex of San Giusto therefore experienced a progressive deterioration from the end of the seventh century AD, followed by total abandonment.
