Salice Salentino · Veglie · Guagnano · Carmiano · Arnesano · LE
Five municipalities in the province of Lecce. Three of them, Salice Salentino, Veglie and Guagnano, fall with their entire territory within the production zone of the Salice Salentino DOC, whose red is made from at least 75% Negroamaro grapes according to the production regulations republished by the protection Consortium. The thread holds only in part, and this must be said: Carmiano and Arnesano do not appear in the regulations, and the two routes of the 2015 map guide published on dms.puglia.it that passed through Salice and Veglie were called “Via dell'olio”. Wine therefore serves as landscape and as boundary. The sources, on the other hand, tell something else: an earthquake, feudal lords, frescoes in the Byzantine tradition carved into the rock, a marquis's palace with eighteenth-century rooms, reopened to the public in 2009 after restoration. It is a journey for those who love small towns and accept that opening times and visits remain to be checked.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Salice Salentino
The name of the town appears for the first time, the Comune's history page recalls, on 10 April 1102, in a diploma of Ruggiero the Norman, Duke of Puglia, confirming to the monastery of San Lorenzo di Aversa certain churches, among them a “sanctum Nikolaum Salice” already granted in 1092. Where that name comes from remains debated: Father Bonaventura da Lama, in 1724, linked it to the willows, but the historian Quarta doubted this, observing that the coat of arms depicts an oak. In 1398, the Comune writes, a castle commissioned by Raimondello Orsini del Balzo was completed; in 1569 Giovanni Antonio I Albricci bought the fief, from 1587 work was under way on the convent of the Reformed Franciscans and the adjoining church, later dedicated to the Madonna della Visitazione, and in 1591 Philip II made Albricci a marquis. Outside the town, to the north, the municipal page places Castello Monaci at about 8.4 km, today privately owned: its history begins in the sixteenth century, Basilian monks settled there and it was sacked several times, the last during the Second World War. The municipal pages consulted do not say where the castle of 1398 stood, nor do they link it to Castello Monaci. Guagnano, the next stop, was born precisely within the feudal territory of Salice.
Day 2 — Guagnano
The day opens on the main square, where the Antico Castello, a 13th-century palace, stands opposite the mother church. According to the municipal page, in 1274 the hamlet was enfeoffed to Guidone Sambiasi and the houses gathered around the castle. The earthquake of 1743 badly damaged it: in one room on the ground floor the barrel vault and the splayed windows remain, while the other rooms were rebuilt with star vaults; the curtain wall is about three metres thick. On the piano nobile a Liberty-style vault painted by M. Leuci arranges Garibaldi, Carducci, Giovanni Bovio and Enrico Ferri around an allegory of Liberty, a winged woman with a butterfly over a stormy sea. The same earthquake, on 20 February 1743, probably also struck the earlier church, of the 14th-15th century. The new one, paid for with the citizens' offerings, was finished in 1798 after more than forty years of work: three naves, a transept and the east-facing façade that incorporates an older small church. On 20 May 1798 the Archbishop of Brindisi Annibale De Leo consecrated its high altar. The detail to look for is a fresco: an enthroned Madonna with Child and two angels, from the late fourteenth to the early fifteenth century, an example of the “maniera greca” that lasted a long time in Terra d'Otranto; mutilated on all four sides, it now sits at the centre of a canvas with the mysteries of the Rosary.
About a kilometre from the centre, on the road to Cellino San Marco, the Masseria San Gaetano, of the 14th century, was in the sixteenth century a monastery of the Theatines and then a post station; it preserves an olive press, a mill and a palmento, and nearby, the Comune says, a village of Messapians and Iapygians was found. The palmento leads to the vineyard. The Comune's “Terre del Negroamaro” site describes a clayey soil of red earth at the meeting point of the provinces of Lecce, Brindisi and Taranto, and dates to 1950 a recovery linked to viticulture, with about half the territory under vines and two thirds of the farm labourers employed in the vineyards; in 1960, the municipal history page recalls, a cooperative winery opened. The next day it is Veglie's turn, the last municipality of the DOC on the route.
Day 3 — Veglie
In Veglie one begins underground. The Cripta della Favana, which the Comune traces back to the 9th century, is a space of about 5.50 by 3.30 metres, 2.20 high, dug into a bank of calcarenite near the “via dei Messapi”, also called the old road to Manduria. The frescoes, with God the Father, the Evangelists, the Virgin and Child and various saints, are Byzantine painting according to the municipal page, now damaged by water seepage. Among the places listed by the Comune there is also Santa Maria della Pietà, founded in the last years of the fourteenth century for worshippers of the Greek-Byzantine rite. The crypt was later looked after by the Friars Minor, whose convent was built in 1579 on a 14th-century predecessor; the FAI dates the church portal to 1651. In the Chiesa Matrice, built in the 11th century and enlarged and restored in 1565, the Comune attributes the Renaissance portal to the school of Gabriele Riccardi, with the Madonna and Child between Saints Peter and Paul, and the Baroque altar of the Santissimo Sacramento to Giuseppe Zimbalo or his school. Santa Maria delle Grazie, built around 1602 on the ruins of a church of the Crocifisso, bears at the top of its façade an eighteenth-century statue of the Baptist in Lecce stone. Tomorrow we leave the DOC zone.
Day 4 — Carmiano and Arnesano
Carmiano gets only a few lines, because the Comune's website publishes neither history nor monuments; what follows comes from the Pro Loco Carmiano-Magliano, a private source to be re-checked. The Celestine Fathers stayed there from 1448 to 1807, leaving a palace 45.50 metres long on the road to Lecce; the Tenuta Li Sala, donated to the Salesians, housed from 1954 an Oenological-Agricultural Institute, the only link with wine found here; the Cappella del Turriso, recorded in 1640, holds the “Lu Riu” festival on Easter Monday.
In Arnesano too the name “lu riu” appears: on Easter Monday, the Comune writes, people go on pilgrimage to the Cappella di Santa Maria di Montevergine, built in 1635 and today in the territory of Lecce and privately owned, eating “lu riu” in the countryside. The centre of the day is the Palazzo Marchesale, in tufa blocks. The first certain records date from 1613, when Paolo Geronimo Marescallo bought the fief and the old castle at auction; under the Prato marquises, from 1693, the reception rooms were created around 1730, with a hall about 11 metres high. Collapses followed after the tremor of 1747 and in 1812. Restored with regional funds and reopened on 20 December 2009, the palace revealed in 2007 tempera frescoes from about 1750-1760, probably attributed to Serafino Elmo: lagoon landscapes, seascapes and a view of Lecce taken from Arnesano. In our proposal one then looks for the Palazzo of Selvaggio Guarini, mayor of Lecce in 1575-76: on the portal the coat of arms in four quarters and the word “TETRAGRAMMATON”, which the page reads as “four letters” or as an allusion to a discipline, perhaps alchemy. The journey ends beneath Porta Rande, whose inscription recalls the ash from Vesuvius that fell here on 16 December 1631, at hour 22.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 10 defects corrected · not approved