Melissano

There are at least four explanations of the name Melissano, and the village has chosen one. It might be a prediale, the praedium of a Melitius, or come from the Latin personal name Melissus, as the toponymists Marinelli and Laporta hold; or from melissa, the wild herb that bees seek out; or from the bees themselves, since μέλισσα in Greek means bee, and from that comes also the trade of the melissaro, the beekeeper. And there are those who take it back to Byzantine times: after Sawdān, the former emir of Bari, had devastated Ugento in 886, the emperor Basil I repopulated the coast between Ugento and Gallipoli with settlers from Heraclea Pontica — whence Racale — and faced Sawdān with the help of the general Melissos. On the arms, at any rate, there is a bee. The first written record of the settlement is of 1269, in the Angevin registers, but the village was probably born in Byzantine times, when the abbey of Santa Maria del Civo stood nearby, at the point where the boundaries of Melissano, Racale and Taviano meet. And under everything lies the rock that bears the village's name: the calcarenite called Calcare di Melissano.

Melissano was for a long time too poor to be a comune. With the abolition of feudalism and the creation of the comuni, the village, which had five hundred inhabitants, was joined to Taviano. In 1850 it asked for its own administration and was refused: the reason given was the extreme poverty of the people. On the first of January 1885 the frazione was detached from Taviano and annexed to Casarano, and it was only from Casarano that it obtained autonomy, in 1922; since 2003 it has held the title of city. In those same years it was building the church that matches it: the Beata Vergine del Rosario, begun in that very 1885 and opened on 8 February 1902, designed by the Lecce architect Ferdinando Campasena, all in Lecce stone, with three naves and a star vault. Inside are the high altar of Carrara marble of 1901 and an eighteenth-century pipe organ that came from the old parish church.