Maglie

The arms of Maglie are made of three rings on a blue ground, and from that drawing a legend was born: that the town grew out of three farms, San Basilio, Sant'Egidio and San Vito, joined together like the links — the maglie — of a chain. A monk of Casarano put it about, and it is plain that the arms invented the origin and not the other way round. The likelier explanation is older and stranger: the Messapian, and therefore Illyrian, root mal, which means height, summit, mountain, and which in its Latinised form gives Malliae — cousin of Mallia on the island of Syros in the Cyclades, and of Malia, the ancient city of Crete. The odd thing is that Maglie lies on a plain; but the fancy of the inhabitants, says the historian who proposed the etymology, saw a mountain in every small rise. And indeed the people came down from the heights that now surround it about the ninth century, to be where the water was: the present centre is crossed, deep below, by an underground stream.

In 1980, in the fondo Cattìe, a deposit was found of about twelve thousand tools and flakes and eight hundred bone remains, among them a fossil human finger bone that probably belonged to a Neanderthal. The country around is full of dolmens and menhirs, and each has its name: the Chianca, the two Caramauli, the Sprunu, the Crocemuzza. In contrada Fraganite there was a Basilian laura of the eighth or ninth century: it was destroyed in 1975. The bell tower of the duomo, built between 1686 and 1690 and some forty metres high, is the tallest in the province, and its four upper storeys are attributed to Giuseppe Zimbalo. And at Maglie, in 1916, Aldo Moro was born.