Several historians of the Salento — De Giorgi, Marciano, Arditi, Coco, Galateo — trace the name back to a Roman centurion called Carminius, to whom the senate of Rome gave a hundred iugera of land in what was then called Calabria and is today the Salento; at his death those lands, lived on by his successors and by a numerous group of followers, took the name Presidium Carmianensis, or Carminianum, and by later vulgarisation Carmiano. Others prefer a simpler reading and take the name from the carmine red of the soil. What the village certainly has, and from a long way back, is its coat of arms — and also the reason it has one at all: under the Normans every village was obliged to provide itself with a distinctive coat of arms, and Carmiano's goes back to the eleventh century. It is a pine tree, with a star in the middle of its crown, and two parallel stripes between the crown and the ground. Each piece means something: the pine is the tree common in these parts, the stripes are the line of the horizon the tree stood out against, that is the flatness of the fief, and the star is there for the noble origin of the place. A coat of arms that is a landscape with a claim inside it.
In 1055 Carmiano was taken into the county of Lecce, within the principality of Taranto. When Maria d'Enghien drew up the statutes of Lecce, in 1445, Carmiano was in them as a casale, and it had been governed by a baron for some sixty years already. Three years later, in 1448, the village was bought by the Celestine fathers, who governed it with great industry — the sixteenth-century Palazzo dei Celestini is what remains of that — and they held it until they were dispossessed, in 1806; then they went to live in the house next to the church of the Immacolata, where the last of them are buried. That church exists because of a pair of oxen. A peasant, they tell, found a picture of the Virgin in an old well and loaded it on his cart to carry it into the village; at a certain point the oxen knelt down and would not get up until he had taken the picture off the cart. The bishop of Lecce, monsignor Luigi Pappacoda, took it for a sign and ordered a church to be raised on that spot; the main altar is by Giuseppe Zimbalo, and it is a masterpiece of Lecce baroque. On the third of September 1943 Allied aircraft dropped several bombs on Carmiano, all of which exploded just outside the village, and the people gave the credit to the Immacolata. Five days later the armistice was announced: it was the eighth of September, which at Magliano is the night of the torchlight procession for the nativity of the Virgin.
