Melendugno

On the coast of Melendugno stands Roca, and the story of Roca is that of a city killed by its own side. The site was already a fortified town between the fifteenth and the eleventh century before Christ; the Messapians rebuilt it, the Romans let it go, and in the early Middle Ages it was inhabited again by anchorites who had come from the Eastern empire and cut their cells into the limestone. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Gualtieri di Brienne, count of Lecce, made it a fortified town once more; in 1480 the Turks arrived and the following year it was freed. The trouble came afterwards: its ruins and its towers became a convenient refuge for Barbary corsairs, and in 1544 Ferrante Loffredo, governor of the province of Terra d'Otranto, ordered it razed to the ground. It was not destroyed by the enemy, it was destroyed by its own government so that the enemy could not use it. Those who lived there moved inland and founded Roca Nuova, which was inhabited until the nineteenth century and then abandoned in its turn, because the air around it made people ill.

The name of the comune, on the other hand, has been sweetened. Legend traces it to Malennio, the mythical founder said to have built Syrbar — that is, Roca, and the word means city of the Sun — along with Lecce and Rudiae; from that root would come Malandugno, which sounds like «bringer of misfortune», and from Malandugno it moved on to Melendugno, «bringer of sweetness». The other hypothesis goes the same way and the coat of arms confirms it: mele, in dialect, is honey, and on the shield there are bees. The territory is the fourth largest in the province, with more than fifteen kilometres of coast dotted with towers — Torre Specchia Ruggeri, San Foca, Torre dell'Orso, Sant'Andrea — and on clear days the island of Saseno and the mountains of Albania can be seen from here with the naked eye. In the countryside towards Calimera stand the dolmens of Placa and Gurgulante, of the Bronze Age; near the cemetery survives the church of the abbey of San Niceta, founded according to the historian Ferrari in 1167 and run by Basilian monks, which depended on San Nicola di Casole, near Otranto.