The name is the bird's, from the Latin turtur, and the wild turtle dove is on the coat of arms too. But here history begins long before names: in the Rosaneto district there is an open-air prehistoric site of the Lower Palaeolithic, dated to about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, one of the oldest sites in Italy, with a thousand or so stone tools, among them 140 choppers and 67 hand axes. Beneath the cliff of Torrenave the excavations have yielded, one layer above the other, the tools of Neanderthal man and then those of Homo sapiens.
On the hill of Palecastro stood Blanda, a city of the Oenotrians later enlarged and fortified by the Lucanians. Livy relates that in 214 BC the consul Quintus Fabius Maximus stormed it, because it had sided with Hannibal; after more than a century and a half of hard going it became a Roman administrative centre and took the name Blanda Julia, in honour of Caesar. It was still a bishop's see in 743, when a bishop of Blanda signed a Roman synod, and then the Saracen raids emptied it: the survivors moved onto a rocky spur inland and called the new settlement Julitta, in memory of the old one. Today the town lives in three pieces: the historic centre and the mountain hamlets with six hundred inhabitants each, and the marina with five thousand.
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📅 Every year, on 3 February; the town also venerates Saint Anthony of Padua as protector
Tortora celebrates its patron saint, Saint Blaise, on 3 February; the town also venerates Saint Anthony of Padua as protector saint.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Tortora, but an easy day trip away.
