Torre Santa Susanna

The name of this village, if tradition is to be believed, comes from a picture painted on a wall. A Roman soldier stationed here, loyal to the emperor and at the same time a Christian, is said to have painted the image of Saint Susanna on the wall of one of the towers he guarded; around that castle clusters of small houses began to rise, and the place was called Turris Sanctae Susannae. The name, in short, comes neither from a founder nor from a master, but from a fresco made by a man who belonged to both worlds. The real origins remain uncertain: the historian Girolamo Marciano wrote that Hannibal, while fighting the people of Oria to take their city, had set one of his camps at the hamlet of Crepacore, and from that clash would come the name of an area still called the Defeat.

Torre Santa Susanna lies at the centre of the Salento peninsula, at the same distance from the Adriatic and the Ionian, on rocky ground: and this is the reason why it grew. All around there were small hamlets — Crepacore, San Giacomo, Galesano, Paradiso, Tubiano, Sorboli — and plagues and earthquakes emptied them one after another; people poured in here, which was the larger settlement, healthier and steadier. Another displacement is told by the records of 918: the Saracens fell upon Oria, put it to fire and sword, killed women and children and carried the survivors off as slaves; the Basilian monastery was razed and the few monks who escaped gathered in the Galesano, where they founded the abbey of Santa Maria di Galaso. The sanctuary that is its heir stands today on two levels, and to reach the church proper one goes down fourteen steps below street level. Outside the village, on the road to Mesagne, there is the Byzantine church of Crepacore, of the eighth century, with the look of a fortified building and a tholos dome: it is thought to stand over a Messapian castle. The feast is on the eleventh of August, for Saint Susanna.