Corigliano d'Otranto

Corigliano is part of the Grecìa Salentina, the linguistic island of nine comuni where Griko is spoken, and in Griko it is called Choriàna. The town's name is traced by assonance to the heart that appears on its arms, or else to a centurion named Corelius to whom the land is supposed to have been assigned; but more probably it comes from the Byzantine Greek choríon, which means village, farm, place. That Greek here was a spoken language and not only a memory is told by Leandro Alberti, who crossed the Salento in 1525 and wrote that the guards who received his caravan spoke only Greek. And it was a written language too: from the ninth century the Basilian monastery of San Giorgio held a school of Greek language and Byzantine culture which left many Greek codices, today kept in important libraries. It declined at the end of the fifteenth century, when the monastery of San Nicola di Casole at Otranto, of which it was a grange, was destroyed.

The first document in which the name appears is of 1192: the Norman king Tancred of Hauteville granted Corigliano in fief to Pietro Indini. In 1465 it was bought from the Royal Court by the de' Monti family, of French origin, come here with the Angevins; between 1514 and 1519 Giovan Battista de' Monti fortified the town and enlarged the castle, giving it four corner towers and heavy artillery, and in 1534 he obtained from Charles V the title of marquis. The marquisate ended with Giorgio, who died young, and in 1651 the whole inheritance was put up for auction and bought by the baron of Tutino, Luigi Trane. The ground here is ancient cracked limestone covered with red earth: it drinks the rain, and indeed on the surface there is not a single watercourse. That is why the countryside is full of cisterns and of pozzelle, the little wells where the water was gathered for everybody. Until 1862 the town was called simply Corigliano.