San Pietro Vernotico

The name comes from the late Latin vernoticus, meaning of winter. There was a feudal right called the jus vernoticae: the lord could graze his own beasts on the winter grass growing in his subjects' fields — and it is probably from that right that the place takes its name; another explanation refers it to the canal that crosses the old village, the one that carries off the winter rain. The first document is of 1195: the empress Constance confirms to the bishop of Lecce, among his fiefs, the church of Blessed Peter «which is called of Vernotico, with its pertinent casale, with men, vassals, cultivated and uncultivated lands, trees, woods and waters» — the men listed between the vassals and the trees.

For centuries this was a small place. Then, in the fifteen hundreds, the Turkish corsairs made the coast road impossible, and the way from Brindisi to Lecce was pulled back inland, to pass through San Pietro Vernotico, Squinzano and Trepuzzi; and it is probably for that reason that in the same half-century the centre of the village moved to where it is now, around the mother church and the square tower. A dictionary of the early eighteen hundreds counts fifteen hundred inhabitants and gives the taxes hearth by hearth: ninety-three in 1532, a hundred and nineteen in 1545, a hundred and ninety-three in 1595, the same in 1648, and a hundred and forty-three in 1669 — the place had grown and then lost a quarter of itself. It ceased to be a fief of the bishop of Lecce with the abolition of feudalism, and in 1928 it entered the new province of Brindisi; but the dialect, the culture and the archdiocese have stayed those of Lecce.