The name is a tax promise: Villa Franca, from the French ville and franche, a town free of taxes — the broad exemptions offered to whoever came to settle. Some trace it instead to a detachment of the Frankish army said to have camped here after 866, when Louis II reached Bari and Oria. The «Fontana», on the other hand, is recent: until 1864 the town was simply Francavilla, and to tell it from its namesakes they called it Francavilla d'Otranto; then a council resolution added the name of the Byzantine icon of the Madonna della Fontana, the one the founding prince is said to have found beside a spring.
Under the Imperiali, the marquesses who made it a small capital, Francavilla became one of the greatest cultural and industrial centres of the upper Salento: the walls were widened, new quarters were born, and from 1715 the Ascension fair began. Then the last prince died childless, the fief passed to the treasury, which sold it off in pieces, and in 1743 the Nardò earthquake destroyed part of the town. There remain the Imperiali castle-palace, the baroque churches, the noble doorways. But the moment the town reveals itself is Holy Week: the pappamusci, barefoot hooded brothers, walk the churches in silence, in one of the most intense rites of the South. The countryside, which is vast, is full of trulli to the north; the via Appia ran below. Ostuni and the sea on one side, Lecce on the other.
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📅 Every year, on 14 September
On 14 September Francavilla Fontana celebrates Maria Santissima della Fontana, the patron known in dialect as the "Matonna tì la Funtana"; the city also venerates three co-patron saints.
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 Francavilla Fontana, but an easy day trip away.
