Cavallino

On the arms of Cavallino there is a white horse, and that horse is there because of an etymology the sources themselves do not believe. One hypothesis brings the name from the Latin caballus, or from the diminutive caballinus, and supposes that a detachment of Roman cavalry was stationed here — but the Romans called the army's horse equus; caballus was the work horse. The explanation more generally accepted traces the name to a Greek root, kàbas, which meant a body of watchmen posted to collect the toll: and in certain old documents the village is written Caballino. The place, in short, is probably named after a customs post, and what it put on its shield is a horse. Long before either name, this was a Messapian town of the first rank, grown on an indigenous settlement of the tenth century before Christ and at its height in the sixth, with an imposing planned layout; and it was destroyed, most probably by the Greeks of Taranto, towards the middle of the fifth century before Christ. Of that town there remain some specchie, the enclosure walls and a number of tombs.

The first nucleus of the village that stands today probably formed in the Byzantine period, around a cenobium built by the Basilian monks, with a small fort beside it; a crypt under the chapel of the Madonna del Monte is what is left of those years. From the end of the twelve hundreds the record is firm: in 1291 count Ugo di Brienne granted the fief to Pietro de Noha, whose family held it for some generations; then, in 1447, through dowry and inheritance, it came to Giovanni Antonio Castromediano — and from that moment the Castromediano kept Cavallino, almost without a break, for three centuries and a half. In 1628 the fief was raised from barony to marquisate. Their name is everywhere: the Dominican convent was built by the wife of a marquis, over an eleventh-century Basilian crypt; the bell tower of the mother church was raised in 1787 at the wish of the marquis Gaetano Castromediano; their funeral chapel is in the right arm of the transept; and one frazione of the comune is simply called Castromediano — and is by now completely swallowed into the built fabric of Lecce. In 1806, when the feudal regime was abolished, Cavallino had about one thousand six hundred inhabitants and became a comune of its own. One last change is recent and drastic: in 1972, after the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council, the presbytery of the mother church was remade — the choir and the baroque marble altar were destroyed, and in place of the old statue of the Madonna Assunta, which today stands in a niche outside, a large walnut crucifix was put.