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Foggia sits in the Tavoliere delle Puglie, the great flat agricultural plain of northern Apulia that the Romans called the 'granary of Italy,' and the city has been defined by wheat and sheep since before recorded history. The name likely comes from the Latin 'fovea,' meaning pit or ditch, referring to the grain storage cellars that were cut into the ground to keep wheat cool before refrigeration. Today an entire network of underground hypogea and cellars still winds beneath the city streets, an invisible second city that hints at how much of Foggia's real character lies below the surface.

The city was a favourite residence of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century, who built a hunting lodge and kept his famous menagerie of exotic animals here.

The opera composer Umberto Giordano was born in Foggia in 1867, and Piazza Umberto Giordano in the city centre honours him with statues of characters from his operas. Foggia's baroque cathedral houses the Icona Vetere, a mysterious dark Madonna discovered in a pond in 1062, and pilgrimage to this icon was the seed around which the medieval city grew. The Gargano peninsula's dramatic white cliffs and Adriatic coves are only about an hour's drive from the city centre.