Nardò · Porto Cesareo · Leverano · Copertino · LE
Four municipalities in the province of Lecce, between the Ionian coast and the countryside behind it. The thread is an ancient fear, the one that came from the sea. The Comune of Nardò links the towers of Porto Selvaggio to the capture of Otranto in 1480 and to the towers that Charles V wanted “each in sight of the next”. In Porto Cesareo, according to the regional portal, the very name of the town comes from a tower, Torre Cesarea. In Leverano, according to the Comune, the tower of Frederick II served as a lookout towards Porto Cesareo. The theme holds well on the coast and less so inland: in Copertino a castle remains, the rest is devotion. The sources also tell of other things: caves inhabited in prehistory, a museum on the post-war Jewish memory, churches rebuilt after an earthquake. It is a journey for those who accept that opening times and visits remain to be checked.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Nardò, the town
We begin at the cathedral, the basilica of Maria Santissima Assunta. Its façade, the Ministry of Culture's record recalls, is the result of several disasters and several remedies: in 1354 Abbot De Nestore rebuilt it after a collapse caused by an earthquake, in 1725 Ferdinando Sanfelice gave it its Baroque dress with the coat of arms of Benedict XIII, and the restorations of 1892-1899 gave it its present appearance. Inside, three naves and frescoes from the thirteenth century onwards, among them a Madonna della Sanità of 1234. The detail to look for is on the altar of the third chapel on the left: the wooden Crucifix known as the “Cristo nero”, in cedar wood, which the record dates to the 12th century. A national monument since 1879, it has been a minor basilica since 1980. In piazza Pio XI the Comune points to the Museo Diocesano “Mons. Aldo Garzia”. The private portal puglia.com helps to read Piazza Salandra: the Palazzo della Pretura was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1743, and the clock, with a rope mechanism of 1882, is wound every day by an attendant. The same source says that the Castello Acquaviva, from the second half of the fifteenth century, now houses the town hall. The day ends at the Museo della Preistoria, in Piazza S. Antonio, which prepares for the next day's coast.
Day 2 — Porto Selvaggio and Santa Maria al Bagno
The museum, according to its municipal page, holds over ten thousand finds and fossil fish of about 75 million years ago, and indicates where they come from: the Baia di Uluzzo, the Grotta del Cavallo, Torre dell'Alto and, in the Porto Selvaggio area, the Bernardini, Mano and Borzatti caves. At these sites, in the 1960s, Palma di Cesnola and Borzatti von Löwenstern found the oldest traces of the genus Homo in the area. The Porto Selvaggio natural park, established in 1980, covers according to the Comune about seven kilometres of coast between Santa Caterina and the Palude del Capitano. The park's pine forest is not ancient: the Corpo Forestale dello Stato planted it at the beginning of the 1950s. Along the coast stand, from south to north, Torre dell'Alto, Torre Uluzzo and Torre Inserraglio, built as defences after the capture of Otranto. Karst explains the other landscape, that of the Palude del Capitano: sinkholes in which brackish water rises, which here they call “spunnulate”. At Santa Maria al Bagno the tone changes. In the former school on Lungomare Lamarmora, a venue fitted out to a design by the architect Luca Zevi, the Museo della Memoria e dell'Accoglienza tells of the camps that between 1944 and 1947 took in Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and preserves the murals of Zvi Miller; for that welcome Nardò received the Gold Medal for Civil Merit. Visits are guided and by reservation. The park, the Region recalls, borders the marine area of Porto Cesareo.
Day 3 — Porto Cesareo
According to the Regione Puglia, the Porto Cesareo Marine Protected Area covers 16,654 hectares and is the third largest in Italy; it is managed by a consortium of the Comuni of Porto Cesareo and Nardò with the Province of Lecce, and some sea caves can be visited by boat. The regional portal sums up the history of the town as a coming and going of the sea: inhabited since the Bronze Age, a commercial centre in Roman times under the name “Portus Sasinae”, then in decline because of pirate raids and silting, revived as a port in the fifteenth century and grown in the 1930s with land reclamation. Torre Cesarea, square in plan, gives the town its name and houses the Guardia di Finanza; Torre Chianca was wanted by Charles V against Turkish raids; of Torre Castiglione, destroyed in the Second World War, only a few ruins remain. According to Wikipedia, to be re-checked, it has been a municipality independent of Nardò since 1975. About a hundred metres from the shore, the Region writes, the Isola Grande owes its popular name of “isola dei Conigli” to a breeding farm of the 1950s, and it is a nesting site for sea turtles. In the centre the Museo di Biologia Marina displays about 900 finds. The singular detail comes from the seabed: according to the Fondazione Terra d'Otranto, in 1932 a green basalt statuette of the Egyptian god Thout in the form of a baboon was found near the isola della Malva, at about five metres, and is now in the Museo Nazionale di Taranto. From the sea the road climbs back inland, where a tower watched over this very coast.
Day 4 — Leverano and Copertino
The tower of Leverano is about 28 metres high, in carparo, a “compact local sandstone”, with a double-helix staircase enclosed in the thickness of the walls and a cross vault with alternating white and dark ribs. The Comune attributes it to Frederick II, as a lookout against pirates heading for Porto Cesareo, and calls it one of the few remains of the Hohenstaufen in Terra d'Otranto. The Chiesa Matrice dell'Annunziata, attributed to Giovanni Maria Tarantino of Nardò, bears an arch dated 1602 and a wooden choir of 24 stalls from 1615; after the earthquake of 20 February 1743 it was rebuilt, the municipal page writes, “at the expense of the people of Leverano”, and from the cusp of the façade apotropaic masks look down. In the cloister of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a convent closed in 1807 and reopened in 1935, run 24 pointed arches on polygonal columns. The Torre dell'Orologio preserves a foliot mechanism that strikes the hours and quarters. Here lived Girolamo Marciano, physician and mayor, author of a description of the province of Otranto published only in 1855.
Copertino gets only a few lines: its municipal website could not be read. The Region tells of the Santuario della Grottella: a Byzantine icon of the Madonna found in the mid-sixteenth century in a cave among the bushes, and the church built in 1577 at the behest of Monsignor Cesare Bovio, with a single nave and three altars. The regional portal describes the castle, restructured by the Castriota in the sixteenth century, with bastions, moat and the Cappella di San Marco, and the Santuario di San Giuseppe da Copertino, completed in 1758, which keeps the heart of the saint brought from Osimo in 1953. Wikipedia, to be re-checked, places here in 1580 the first permanent printing press of Terra d'Otranto. The journey, in our proposal, ends beneath the walls of the castle.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 12 defects corrected · not approved