Cassano delle Murge

At a place in the territory still called Lago di Battaglia, in late antiquity, there was a clash of the Greek-Gothic war between the army of the Eastern empire and the troops of Totila. The story goes that in that battle a woman of Cassano distinguished herself by her courage, dressed as a warrior, and fell there; to honour her memory her companions raised her a monument with a heap of stones, and that heap is still called today the specchia di femina morta, the cairn of the dead woman. The territory is karst and full of caves: the largest, the cave called of Christ, was discovered in the seventeenth century a couple of kilometres from the town, and to the east there is the grave di Pasciullo, a hundred and eighty metres deep and still unexplored. The wood the town is known for, on the other hand, was planted on purpose: the Mercadante forest dates from 1928, and it was made to stop the Murgia from crumbling away.

The name probably comes from the Roman name Cassius, or from the gens Cassia that owned these lands. A local historian preferred casa Jani, the house of Janus, but the derivation is doubtful for a grammatical reason: in Latin a house is domus, not casa. The temple of Janus, though, really existed, and historical inquiry places it where the church of the Santissimo Crocifisso now stands. There are seven Cassano in Italy, and so as not to be confused with the others this one added «delle Murge» in 1862. The arms have changed face several times: the first symbol was a pelican wounding its own breast to feed its young, the allegory of Christ sacrificing himself; through the nineteenth century the pelican alternated with the Virgin of the Assumption between two little angels, or with saints Nicholas and Rocco, and in 1934 it was the Virgin of the Assumption, resting on the clouds, that was formalized. In the present version the fascist-era chief of the littorio has been replaced by a chief of azure.