Mesagne

The castle has stood there since the eleventh century and in 1195 passed to the Teutonic Knights; today it houses the archaeological museum, which suits it, because Messapian burials have come to light beneath the town. Mesagne was the halfway stop between Oria and the port of Brindisi, and for that reason everyone wanted it: even Archytas, the philosopher who governed Taranto, sent a military expedition against it. In the fifteenth century the prince of Taranto, Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo, enlarged the castle and turned it into a residence, and from then on the town grew: paved streets, a theatre, a hospital, and palaces with rusticated doorways, loggias and pierced balustrades.

Its churches tell of fears and of narrow escapes. In July 1526 the plague reached here too, and people turned to a fresco of the Madonna in a half-unroofed chapel by the small gate: when the epidemic passed they rebuilt it, larger, and it is the church of Santa Maria in Betlehem. The mother church, on the other hand, collapsed of its own accord on the thirty-first of May 1649, and was rebuilt in ten years; the baroque face it wears now came after the earthquake that devastated Nardò, with the apostles ranged over three tiers of the front and, at the top, a Christ that lightning brought down in the nineteenth century. In another church a noblewoman, Ilaria Falces, left a fund for the dowries of girls who had none. The town, meanwhile, spreads out into twenty-two country districts.