Racale · Taviano · Melissano · Alliste · Ugento · LE
Five municipalities in the province of Lecce, between the tower of Torre Suda and the Messapian walls of Ugento. The hypothesised theme, coast and countryside, holds only in part: the sources consulted speak of the sea for Racale (Torre Suda) and, in a 2014 text on the old website of the Comune of Alliste, for Felline, not for Taviano and Melissano. The thread that holds best is that of the feudal lords. In 1411 Racale passes to the Tolomei, a Sienese family; in 1415 Puccio Tolomei grants rights and liberties to the community of Alliste; at Felline a restoration in 2005 brought to light the portraits of Camillo and Porsia Tolomei. Ugento closes with a history that the sources follow from the menhirs and the Messapians to the d'Amore marquises. It is a journey for those who love churches, towers and small museums, and accept that Taviano remains almost silent and that opening times and visits are to be checked.
At a glance
Duration. 4 days.
The route
Day 1 — Racale, inside the walls
The day begins where one used to enter the town. Porta Terra, facing east, was the main one of the three gates that the tavolario Gennaro Pinto records in the apprezzo ordered on 10 December 1682 (“S'entra in essa terra per tre porte”), and according to the Comune's page it survived until 1864; of its side towers one became a bell tower in 1535, the other a civic tower, and a plaque bears the she-wolf with the date 1408. Three years later, in 1411, Racale was enfeoffed to the Tolomei, who according to the municipal page remained its lords for about two centuries: Puccio Tolomei probably built the castle, and their coat of arms with two crescents can still be seen on the string course of the atrium, on the west side. The atrium, about 11 metres a side, has a loggia of round arches; of the towers two remain, and in the eighteenth century the Basurto barons added the main door and the left wing. The appearance of the Chiesa Madre di Santa Maria de' Paradiso is explained by an earthquake, that of 20 February 1743, which the municipal page calls devastating: the church was rebuilt and the façade completed in 1744-1748. Another earthquake, in 1395, according to the Chronicon Neritinum cited by the Comune, destroyed the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria la Nova; on the ruins came the Franciscans, and in 1453 Baron Salvatore Tolomei built the convent, demolished in 1962 to make way for a nursery school. The following day we head out towards the serra and the sea.
Day 2 — Torre Suda, Ospina and Taviano
Racale's sea is at Torre Suda, a frazione. The coastal tower, of uncertain year but present in the official list of the Kingdom of Naples dated 1613, raises on a truncated-cone base of about 11 metres, with a cistern, a cylindrical level with three arrow slits; it is reached by an external staircase of 29 steps, the only entrance, and the Comune says it can be visited from the outside. Around it, the eclectic villas built between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be visited only by arrangement with the owners. Inland, at the foot of the collina degli Specchi along the SP 222, the Dolmen Ospina has its capstone, 250 by 190 centimetres, broken and now on the ground awaiting repositioning after the Soprintendenza's restoration; the municipal page supposes that its use as a dog kennel perhaps preserved it. Of the Masseria Torre Ospina the best preserved part is the tower, in carparo blocks with machicolations, dated on stylistic grounds to the first half of the sixteenth century. The Menhir Castelforte, which the Comune of Racale places on the boundary with Taviano, serves as a threshold.
Taviano gets only a few lines: the municipal website did not open, and the information comes from a private tourism portal, to be re-checked. There one reads that in 1190 Tancredi d'Altavilla assigned Taviano with the hamlet of Casarano to Ottavio Foggetta and that in 1301 the fief passed to Ugone Del Balzo; the church of San Martino di Tours, of the 15th century, was restructured in 1635, and the sanctuary of the Addolorata was founded in 1643 next to the convent of the Reformed Friars Minor. Until 1885 Melissano was one of its frazioni: it is the next stop.
Day 3 — Melissano, Alliste and Felline
Melissano tells, in the Comune's history page, a story of depopulation and of fields. In October 1452 Alfonso I of Aragon granted Raimondo Del Balzo the right to repopulate the fief, which in 1459 counted four hearths; in 1811 a famine carried off more than a tenth of the inhabitants. The churches of San Pietro and San Nicola, earlier than 1452, were probably of Italo-Greek worship, like the abbey of Civo, where Giliberto, constable of Count Goffredo of Nardò, was buried: on 25 March people gathered in front of the remains; the ruins, the Comune writes, were removed a few decades ago. The catasto onciario describes an almost entirely agricultural town, and after phylloxera a cooperative winery was founded. The civic tower and the new parish church of the Rosario belong to the town that in 1885 had passed to Casarano and in 1922 gained autonomy.
In Alliste a document of 1412 calls the territory “Terra Graecorum”. The church of San Quintino was founded in 1455 just outside the walls; the saint took the place of San Sabino, of Byzantine tradition, as patron, and in 1585 Cardinal Alessandrini asked the bishop of Nardò to suppress the Greek rite; the restorations of 1988 revealed ancient columns inside the pillars. In August 1879, writes the history of the town published on the old website of the Comune, about two hundred peasants occupied the Masseria Stracca: 65 arrests. At Felline, a frazione, on the Serra dell'Alto, the rock church of Santa Maria dell'Alto, according to the text on the church published by the Comune, has a barrel-vaulted nave of 7.10 by 16.60 metres, and the 2005 restoration brought to light there the portraits of the patrons Camillo and Porsia Tolomei. Tomorrow the first stop is a crypt that the Comune of Ugento places near the turn-off for Melissano.
Day 4 — Ugento
The Cripta del Crocefisso lies along the provincial road to Casarano, near the ancient axis of the via Sallentina: a hypogeum with a trapezoidal plan and a sixteenth-century portal, where the municipal page identifies the Annunciation as the oldest fresco and the seventeenth-century Crucifixion as the origin of the name; on the vault, red and black crusader shields that the page associates with the Templars or the Teutonic Knights. It can be visited, together with the Castle and the Madonna di Costantinopoli, only by reservation. In the town history stretches backwards: a Messapian wall circuit of 4,900 metres enclosed about 145 hectares, and a stretch can be seen in the locality of Porchiano, towards Taurisano. On Christmas Eve 1961, while digging the foundations of a house between via Pittore and via Mazzini, there emerged, hidden in a cavity in the rock, a bronze Zeus 74 centimetres high, from the second half of the 6th century BC. The original is in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Taranto; in Ugento a copy by the artist Murat Cura remains, in the museum set up in the former convent of Santa Maria della Pietà, which the municipal page says was built in 1430 at the behest of Raimondello Orsini del Balzo; among its sections the museum also has the Tomba dell'Atleta. The castle explains the later town: in 1537 the Turks badly damaged it, in 1564 Count Vincenzo Pandone began its reconstruction, the d'Amore marquises owned it from 1643, and in 1692 the piano nobile was frescoed, with a hall inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses. Beneath the Cathedral is the Museo Diocesano; its municipal page recalls the document of Innocent III of 23 June 1198 listing Ugento among the suffragans of Otranto. Here, in our proposal, the journey ends.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 12 defects corrected · not approved