Matino

The sources here do a rare thing: they take their own town's legends apart. The Oscan etymology — Mat, cultivated ground — is judged doubtful, because Oscan never reached the lower Salento, because no trace of it has been found at any Salentine site, and because giving a village an Oscan name around the year one thousand, when those dialects had been gone for at least six centuries, makes little sense. The foundation legend gets the same treatment: Matino was supposedly born of refugees from Alezio and from a city called Bavota, and the entry answers that the dialects of the three places are too different to share a matrix, that Alezio at that date was at most a half-abandoned casale, and that Bavota probably never existed at all — authoritative scholars hold it to be a copyist's bad transcription. What is left is better than what was demolished. There was another Matino, on the coast of the Gargano: founded around the year one thousand before Christ, called Apeneste by the Greeks and Matinum by the Romans, a seafaring and trading town of some weight. Apeneste, in ancient Greek, means «that is born», «that rises», with the sun clearly understood; and the Latin Matinum keeps the same sense. Its people, the Matinates ex Gargani as Pliny the Elder calls them, were a small people of Greek, Daunian and Iapygian stock, come with the great migration that brought first the Illyrians to these coasts and then, a couple of centuries later, the Greek colonists. There is certain news of that town until 980, when it disappears from every document; part of its ruins lie today under the Adriatic, so it may have been an earthquake and sea-flood, or the Saracen raids of those same years, or both.

The new Matino would have been founded by the survivors, and the argument for it is a coincidence: the town on the Gargano dies between 971 and 980, and the town down here is born in those same years. To which the sources add a second clue, and it hangs on the wall of the town hall. The arms of new Matino, adopted in the Norman age, show a sun rising between two hills — that is, in a picture, what Apeneste and Matinum meant in words. The first document naming the place is of 1099: somebody offers the monastery of Santa Maria di Nardò the church of Sant'Anastasia di Matino, «with well, houses, olives and all its lands». The first baron was Filippo de Persona, and his son took the fief's name for his own, as the Normans did. They were Ghibellines and utterly loyal to the Hohenstaufen, among the greatest feudatories of the kingdom of Sicily; and one of them, Glicerio, commanded the unlucky siege of Gallipoli and was tortured and hanged at Brindisi by the Angevins, dying a few months before his father. In 1269 Charles of Anjou stripped them of every fief. They got Matino back about a century later. The old town stands on the hill of Sant'Ermete between two karst ravines that people here call the Universo and the Reale, and around it are the masserie and the caseddhi, dry-stone huts built with techniques that came from Magna Graecia. In recent years the countryside has changed its face: Xylella fastidiosa has killed the centuries-old olive trees, and the red weevil has taken the palms.