Campi Salentina

The name is Greek: kampia, small fields, which became Campie and then Campi; the «Salentina» was added in 1864. The plain was already lived on in the Bronze Age — the menhirs scattered across the whole territory say so — and on the ridge of the Madonna dell'Alto there remain traces of a cult of Aphrodite between the fourth and the third century before Christ. But the town as it is begins with a destruction: on the ridges around Campi stood five small villages, Afra, Bagnara, Firmigliano, Ainoli and Terenzano, and the Saracens invaded and destroyed them in 926; the survivors came down into the wooded hollow, where they could live and could be defended, and that is where the town stands. With the Normans Campi went into the county of Lecce, and in the twelfth century it became a diocesan seat, after Tancred of Hauteville, king of Sicily, made a gift of it to the bishop of Lecce. In 1220 Frederick II had a castle built here and chose it as his summer residence, together with his notary Pier delle Vigne.

That castle became the house of the Maremonti, who had the fief from the Basilian monks and held it for more than a century and a half, remaking it first in late Gothic and then in Renaissance taste; after them came the Paladini. And with the Paladini the town had its best years. Maria Paladini, the last of the family, married Giovanni Enriquez, regent of the supreme council of Madrid in the Kingdom of Naples; Philip IV of Spain raised Campi to a marquisate by royal decree in 1627, and the castle was turned into a marquisal palace with baroque work inside and out. The Enriquez bought pictures for the family collection from the best Neapolitan painters of the day — Jusepe de Ribera, Agostino Beltrano — but the thing that counts most is a letter. On the sixth of November 1628 Giovanni Enriquez wrote directly to Saint Joseph Calasanz; and on the twenty-fourth of March 1629 the convent of the Piarists was founded at Campi, with the library beside it, and inside it a house of the Scuole Pie was established: the first school open to the people in Puglia. Four months between a letter and a school. The town went on being generous with itself afterwards too — the noblewoman Cecilia Capece Minutolo and her son, the cardinal Enrico, kept furnishing the main church and the religious and cultural institutions — and among the people born here, much later, is Carmelo Bene.