Lesina

Lesina lives on the lagoon that bears its name, and always has: fish, and above all eels, which here are still cooked on Christmas Eve. In 788, the Chronicon Volturnense relates, Grimoald prince of Benevento gave the lake's fishery to the abbot of Montecassino; the fish of this lagoon was famous in Naples, where at Christmas time it arrived in two days on horse-drawn carts, and it was so plentiful that it was salted down for export. But the water has always presented its bill: earthquakes, sea floods and malaria have decimated the population more than once. In the seventh century the town was repopulated by the citizens of Lucera, destroyed by the emperor Constans II, who took refuge here with their bishop; and other people came from the opposite shore of the Adriatic, from the Dalmatian island of Lesina, which bears the same name as this town.

The lake, however, for centuries did not belong to the people of Lesina. By a deed of the sixth of November 1411 queen Margaret, widow of Charles III, gave the lagoon to the orphanage of the Casa Santa dell'Annunziata of Naples, run by the bank of the same name: for three hundred years the lake of a town in Apulia belonged to a Neapolitan orphanage. The bank failed in 1717, drained by the king's withdrawals during the wars and by the frauds of its own agents, and in 1751 the lagoon was bought at auction by the marquis Placido Imperiale, who unlike other barons exercised his rights harshly. In between had come the earthquake of the thirtieth of July 1627, followed by a tidal wave along the whole coast. A survey of 1729 photographs the town: an obelisk at the entrance with a cross of white stone, the gate with the image of saint Primianus and the clock above it, the keep of the tower, a gate on the lake for the fishermen, a tavern, a wood-fired oven, a mill — and five hundred and forty-five inhabitants, with all that fish.