Cannole

Cannole lies in south-eastern Salento, a few kilometres from the Alimini lakes and from Otranto, and its name comes from reeds: the surrounding fields were once thick with reed beds, and the reed ended up on the municipal arms. The nineteenth-century historian Vincenzo Maggiulli said as much in a Latin phrase that explains everything: because the land around was rich in reeds, the village was called Cannole. And the reed beds are in the story of its origins too: some trace them to the Saracens who camped their troops here after the Arab invasion of 885, some to the twelfth century, when people who had escaped the destructions of William the Bad went to hide among the reeds.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Cannole was one of the Decatría Choría, the thirteen villages of the Terra d'Otranto that still kept the Greek language and its traditions: today the Grecìa Salentina numbers nine, and what happened to the other four is the story of a language withdrawing. From the remoter past the menhirs survive, and their fate says a great deal: the one inside the village, called Osanna, was destroyed in the early twentieth century; the one at Santu Lasi, found in precarious balance in 1965, fell in 1995 and broke into four pieces, probably because of an olive tree that had grown beside it. From here, too, came Giuseppe Villani, the doctor who saved princess Mafalda of Savoy from an intestinal obstruction when she was still an infant.