Until Italian unification this town in the Salento was called San Pietro in Galatina, and the Griko name, As Pètro, still survives in the local dialect: only in 1861 did it go back to being simply Galatina. Here, in 1391, prince Raimondello Orsini del Balzo had the basilica of Santa Caterina d'Alessandria built as a vow for coming back alive from the crusade, bringing with him a relic of the saint; after his death, it was his wife, queen Maria d'Enghien, who had it frescoed from end to end, calling in painters from half of Italy. In the apse rests the couple's son, Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo, who enlarged the church further and attached a hospital to it.
On his death the duchy passed, by will of the king of Naples, to Giovanni Castriota, son of George Castriota Skanderbeg: the very Castriota family that had been stripped of the fief of San Giovanni Rotondo. Under them Galatina had a small golden age of court, philosophers and sculptors. But the town's most secret place is another one: the little church of San Paolo, known as the chapel of the Tarantate, where until the late nineteen-fifties women bitten by the tarantula came to ask for their cure, praying and dancing to tambourines until the musical exorcism set them free. It was that very rite, watched up close, that brought the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino here in 1959.
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📅 Every year, on 29 June; Santa Maria della Luce, co-patron, is celebrated on the fourth Thursday after Easter
Galatina celebrates Saint Peter and Saint Paul on 29 June, in the church dedicated to them, once the destination of the «tarantate» women seeking a cure for the tarantula's bite; the town's co-patron is Santa Maria della Luce, celebrated on the fourth Thursday after Easter.
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.
Outside Galatina, but an easy day trip away.
