Santa's grave

Pilgrims visit the Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari. Picture / Andrew Bain

It is a Christmas paradox that St Nicholas, the spirited giver, should be entombed in Bari, an Italian city more famous for the spirit of taking.

Known to most as either a ferry port or a den of thieves, it is in this uncelebrated city on Italy's Adriatic coast that the remains of the Santa Claus prototype are interred.

Appropriately for a city with Bari's reputation, it took a theft to get them there.

Born in Asia Minor (now Turkey) in the third century to wealthy parents, the future St Nicholas dispensed with his inheritance by using it to help the needy and the suffering.

One story tells of the young Nicholas assisting a poor man with three daughters. With no money for dowries, the man was on the brink of selling them into prostitution or slavery. On three separate occasions Nicholas threw bags of gold through an open window of the house. The gold was said to have landed in stockings hung in front of the fire to dry.

A variety of other selfless acts earned St Nicholas standing as the patron saint of, among others, children, sailors, students, paupers and, prophetically, thieves, and since then he has morphed into the white-bearded, red-suited Santa Claus who presides over Christmas.

When St Nicholas died around AD 345, his remains were interred in the Turkish town of Myra.

But in 1087 the remains were stolen by Bari sailors and whisked away to their hometown, where they were installed in a crypt and a basilica constructed over the top. There they have stayed for a millennium, gradually becoming not plunder but a site of Christian pilgrimage.

The Basilica of St Nicholas is considered one of the world's finest examples of Romanesque architecture and sits at one edge of the maze that is Bari's old town.

Designed to confuse and lose potential invaders, the lanes and streets of the partially walled old town are like doodles in the earth. Inside this labyrinth there are said to be around 40 churches, though none attract such attention as the gleaming white Basilica of St Nicholas, which fills and almost overflows its eponymous square.

Outside stands a bronze statue of St Nicholas, holding in one hand the three gold balls that have come to symbolise the saint. Each one represents a bag of the dowry gold that helped create the legend that became the Christmas stocking.

Inside, down a flight of stairs, is the darkened chapel that holds St Nicholas' remains. Candles surround the crypt and chandeliers cast a low light through the Gothic chapel.

Since 1966, an Orthodox chapel has also filled one side of the area, a concession to the many pilgrims from countries such as Russia and Greece who hold St Nicholas in great reverence. The crypt has the simplest of signs, "Tomba del Santo", and is protected by an iron grille. It's as though, almost 1000 years on, Bari, the Grinch who did indeed steal Christmas, is still worried about a reciprocal raid.