San Michele Salentino

This village was founded twice, and both times by an owner who wanted to make his land yield. In the first decades of the seventeenth century Michele Vaaz de Andrada, count of Mola and baron of San Donato, set up a small village around an already existing farmstead, and peopled it with ninety families of emigrants from Schiavonia, that is, from the Balkans: for that reason, until a few decades ago, San Michele Salentino was also called Massarianova. The second foundation is of August 1839, when prince Francesco Dentice di Frasso — son of that Gerardo who at the end of the eighteenth century had built the Masseria San Michele on an estate of three hundred and eighty-nine hectares — granted sixty-one settlers some of his land in the districts of San Michele and Aieni. That is held to be the village's birth certificate, and on the town's arms there is still the golden dentex of the Dentice.

Autonomy, though, it had to take for itself. The district depended first on Ceglie and then on San Vito, towards which the roads were easier: it had a cemetery of its own in 1876, a new church in 1882 and a parish in 1901, but not a comune. The people asked for it insistently, the dispute dragged on and in 1912 and 1913 it ended in unrest and violence too; it closed only on 25 October 1928, when the comune was set up, the twentieth of the province of Brindisi. On that occasion the name changed to San Michele Salentino, so as not to confuse it with the other places named after the archangel. Today the village has two very different records: the fico mandorlato, an almond-and-fig sweet that is a Slow Food presidium, and the ratio of used-car dealers to inhabitants, said to be the highest in Europe.