Leverano

Leverano was born, says the local historian Geronimo Marciano, as a camp of refugees from two casali destroyed by Totila; the Saracens wiped it out in the ninth century, the Normans rebuilt it and put up a modest wooden tower. In 1220 Frederick II had that tower rebuilt in stone: it is square in plan, twenty-eight metres high, crowned with merlons, and its four faces are oriented to the points of the compass. Two centuries later the count of Copertino, Tristan of Clermont, gave the town walls and turned the by then ruined tower into a farm building. The name is said to come from Liberanium, which in Greek indicates a wet, marshy ground: the territory was marshy until the reclamations of the last century. In the tithe registers of the fourteenth century the place is called Livoranum.

The arms show a tower between two capital letters, an L and a B, and nobody knows for certain what they stand for: perhaps the old name Liberianum, perhaps a Latin phrase about the beneficence of the people of Leverano. The mother church was begun in 1582 and finished in the seventeenth century, with a front ending in a Catalan-Durazzesque cusp and a choir of twenty-four stalls; the earthquake of 1743 damaged it badly, and in 1829, on the last day of March, its bell tower collapsed and brought the left nave down with it — the present one is of the twentieth century. The convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie has a cloister with twenty-four ogives resting on polygonal columns; closed in 1807 with the suppression of the religious orders, it stayed closed until 1935, when the town council gave it back to the Friars Minor. And in the church of the Consolazione a Byzantine Virgin Hodegetria is kept.