Cutrofiano

Cutrofiano owes its name to an object: the cutrubbi, the clay containers that have always been made here — the word comes from the Greek khytra, vase, and from Cutrubbiano one arrives at Cutrofiano. It is not a tourist label: in 1745, when the tax registers ordered by the king of Naples were drawn up, the town counted about 650 inhabitants and 150 of them lived by ceramics, that is nearly one in four. They had different names according to what they threw on the wheel — pignatari, piattari, codimari — and the kilns stood inside the town. That clay has been worked here for a very long time is confirmed by a Roman kiln that came to light at Scacciato.

To keep those kilns going, wood was needed, and the wood came from the forest of Cutrofiano, a strip of the great Mediterranean scrub that once covered the lower Salento: in the fifteenth century it was still common land, that is everybody's, and it stretched for a thousand tomoli, a little over seven hundred hectares. When, with the abolition of feudalism, it came to be divided between the feudal lord and the Universitas, its extent was almost halved and the lord ended up becoming, «by compromise», the owner of a public good. Ceramics, meanwhile, have remained: in the nineteen sixties the comune had to regulate the dust from the kilns still working in the centre, while many people from Cutrofiano were leaving for northern Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. One last thing: since 2007 Cutrofiano has belonged to the union of comuni of the Grecìa Salentina, even though griko has not been spoken here for about a century and a half.