Francavilla Marittima

The name is a tax exemption. VillaFranca meant a village free of tributes; it later became Francavilla, and in 1863 Marittima was added to it because it is near the sea. Before it was a village, though, this place was a boundary: in the twelfth century the area is called Divisa, the divider between the fiefs of Cassano and Cerchiara, and is described as a holding covered in woods and without dwellings; then it becomes a casale, a scatter of houses depending on a larger centre; and in the fifteenth century it belongs to the Sanseverino, princes of Bisignano. The princely crown still on the coat of arms is theirs, above a crenellated tower and a castle, with stars for the outlying districts and branches of olive and oak.

Underneath the village, though, there is a great deal more: on the hill of the Timpone della Motta stood an Oenotrian village and then a Greek sanctuary, and beside it lies the necropolis of Macchiabate. In the old centre the fontana vecchia of 1793 pours from three spouts into three marble basins, and its brick front was built for it in 1897 by Garofalo and De Simone; the mother church is of the eighteenth century, its bell tower of the century before, and the bronze bell was cast in 1716 by Antonio Starita. The sanctuary of the Beata Vergine degli Infermi, finally, was the private chapel of the dukes Serra di Cassano: sold in the eighteenth century to the Apolito family, it was rebuilt by them from scratch in 1806, after an apparition on the night of 14 September of that year, and their descendants own it to this day.