On the arms there is a Roman courier with a packet of letters in his hand: here, they say, was a station of the diarii cursores, the messengers who carried military dispatches down to Lecce and the southern Salento, and the name of the village would come from theirs.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Cursi was one of the Decatría Choría, the thirteen villages of the Terra d'Otranto that still kept the Greek language and customs. The village lies in a hollow, on a bank of soft limestone: this is where the pietra leccese is quarried, and the open-air quarries are still working. Outside the village the sanctuary of the Madonna dell'Abbondanza was born after a long drought; lightning set it on fire in 1708 and it was rebuilt.
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📅 Every year, on the second-to-last Saturday of May
Cursi celebrates Saint Nicholas the Bishop, its patron, on the second-to-last Saturday of May. On the second Sunday of July, Our Lady of Abundance is celebrated instead.
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.
