San Donaci

At the locality of Monticello, on the road to Mesagne, there is the ruin of an octagonal temple that is held to be one of the oldest early-Christian places of worship in all Apulia: they call it San Miserino. The dome, in opus cementicium, rests on eight pillars with stucco capitals decorated with acanthus leaves; the interior lies a couple of metres below the level of the fields and has four small opposed apses, traces of red plaster on the walls and, on the floor, parts of a two-colour mosaic probably Roman. The Byzantine frescoes and the stuccoes, on the other hand, have vanished. In all likelihood it was born in Roman times as a pagan temple, or as a nymphaeum, and the first Christians then used it as a baptistery. It stands about a hundred metres from the Limitone dei Greci, the old wall that divided the Byzantine zone, to the south, from the Lombard one, to the north.

The village's name too has an unexpected explanation: the «San» may not be a saint at all. According to a recent proposal, donaci would come from the Latin dominicum, then donicum: the original phrase must have sounded like «hamlet of the demesne land», that is, land not granted in fief, and since the owner was probably a church body, from that the adjective holy would have been born. It would be, in short, a pseudo-hagiotoponym, although others tie it to a saint venerated in the medieval Salento, San Dana or Danax. The village was in any case a fief of the archbishop of Brindisi from the twelfth century until the end of the eighteenth, with only one formal break: in 1461 Ferdinand of Aragon assigned it to Giorgio Castriota Scanderbeg for the help received in war, but Scanderbeg and the Albanian colony that had taken possession of it preferred to leave it to the archbishop. Today San Donaci lives on vines, on oil and on grain.