Collepasso lies on the slopes of the serra di Sant'Eleuterio, in one of the highest areas of the province of Lecce, and in its fields the Asso canal is born: a short watercourse that after a few kilometres ends swallowed by a karst sinkhole north of Nardò. The name, on the other hand, was remade at a desk. In the documents it appears for the first time in Greek, in the twelfth century, as Koulopatze, and then in the vulgarised Latin forms Colopati and Colopaci: probably the hamlet of Nicola Ippazio, or the village of Saint Nicholas, that is a Byzantine settlement destroyed by the Saracens before the eleventh century. In the nineteenth century that rough name was to be made genteel, and they leaned on eighteenth-century Latin forms and on the lie of the land: collis passus, the hill of the passage, because through here one had to pass to cross the Salentine ridges. Of the medieval hamlet nothing remains: it probably vanished in the economic and epidemic crisis of the fourteenth century, the one that wiped dozens of hamlets of the Terra d'Otranto off the maps.
For centuries afterwards there were only farmsteads here with settlers and seasonal labourers: people, not a community. The turn came in 1805, when the baroness Maria Aurora Leuzzi and the count Bartolomeo degli Alberti di Enno, arrived from Naples, decided to make a village be born. They modernised the existing palace, built in 1576, and called onto the lands of the fief peasants from the neighbouring towns, with emphyteutic grants for the houses, for the plantations and for the vines. The count even drew a plan of the streets around the castle, but between 1813 and 1816 the houses went up all the same in disorder, and the disorder did no harm. The rest was done by the road from Maglie to Gallipoli, completed in 1851: in 1861 the first census counted one thousand and sixty-seven inhabitants, in 1907 they were two thousand seven hundred, and in that very year a law wanted by the deputy Antonio Vallone of Galatina gave Collepasso its own comune, detaching it from Cutrofiano.
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📅 Every year, from 7 to 9 September, with the Palio Collepassese held since 1980
Collepasso celebrates Our Lady of Grace from 7 to 9 September. The Palio Collepassese, born in 1980 and organized with the CSI and the town's districts, sees the town's four districts compete in games and sports disciplines.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
