Martignano is the smallest of the nine comuni of the Grecìa Salentina, the language island where Griko is still spoken: a little over six square kilometres on a low ridge covered with old olive trees. There are three theories about the name: the most accepted derives it from the Byzantine mártus, witness of the faith, after the place of worship the Basilian monks established here; another from the Latin Martinius; the third from the pine marten, and that is the one the sources judge fanciful — yet it is precisely the marten that ended up on the village arms in the sixteenth century.
The hamlet stood where the via Traiana Calabra crossed the road from Roca Vecchia to Nardò, and it appears in the documents from the thirteenth century, when the Angevins granted it to a son-in-law of Charles I. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were hard: the feudal lords squeezed the village to keep up their Neapolitan style of life, and by the end of the eighteenth century Martignano was down to 530 inhabitants. In 1808 it was even attached to Sternatia and remained a hamlet of it until 1832. The chapel of San Giovanni Battista, of 1621, is worth going into: it is entirely frescoed, and in the upper band eleven panels tell the life of the Baptist to a people who could not read. From here, too, came Giuseppe Palmieri, one of the major figures of the southern Enlightenment.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 26 and 27 July
On 26 and 27 July Martignano, a municipality of 1,730 inhabitants in the province of Lecce, celebrates its patron Saint Pantaleon (San Pantaleone).
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 Martignano, but an easy day trip away.
