San Pancrazio Salentino

Above the side entrance of the church of Sant'Antonio da Padova there is a fresco that tells of this village's worst night. On the first of January 1547 five Turkish galleons landed at Torre Colimena, on the Ionian coast; about a hundred men, led by one Cria, a traitor from Avetrana, having failed in their assault on a town near Taranto, fell back on San Pancrazio and took it by surprise. The village was sacked and destroyed, and almost all the inhabitants were carried off and sold as slaves in Turkey. The fresco, however, does not stop at the massacre: it also shows the end of Cria, captured by the survivors, tied naked to a pole and finished off with stones and arrows. It is a rare thing, a village that paints in its church both its own destruction and its own revenge. Nor was it the first time: in 1480, after the taking of Otranto, four hundred Turkish horsemen landed at San Cataldo had already laid waste to this countryside.

The name comes from the patron saint: around a small church dedicated to Saint Pancras the martyr — the venerabilem ecclesiam S. Pancratii named in a deed of donation of 1063 — the first hamlet grew up between the tenth and eleventh centuries. In 1107 Sichelgaita, wife of the count of Conversano, gave these lands to the archdiocese of Brindisi, and from then on the archbishops were also barons of San Pancrazio, until 1866. When a plague emptied the village, in 1221 archbishop Pellegrino repopulated it by moving in citizens of Brindisi, who for the occasion were exempted from tithes, and had the archiepiscopal castle built as a summer residence: the air here was good, and it is for the same reason that in the sixteenth century archbishop Girolamo Aleandro came to spend the summer. The village remained a hamlet of Torre Santa Susanna until the first of January 1839, and the story goes that autonomy came because Ferdinand II, passing through, was offered a bunch of flowers by a little girl, Chiara Micelli. The second name, by contrast, is bureaucratic: Salentino was added in 1862 so as not to confuse it with San Pancrazio Parmense. It is the southernmost comune of the province of Brindisi and one of the least rainy places in Italy.