Melpignano

Melpignano is one of the nine municipalities of the Grecìa Salentina, the language island where Griko is spoken, an idiom of Greek origin: in Griko the village is called Lipignana. Every August half of Italy comes here, because this is where the closing concert of the Notte della Taranta is held, the festival that put the pizzica back into circulation. The name, on the other hand, is probably an estate: praedium Melpinianum, the land of one Melpinius; though some bring in the muse Melpomene, and others honey.

The fief passed through many hands — the Lettere, the Orsini del Balzo, the Mosco, the Ramirez — among them the Branai Castriota, descendants of that Vrana Konti who had stood beside Skanderbeg, and finally the marquises de Luca. Then, with the end of feudalism, in 1806 Melpignano was joined to Castrignano de' Greci: the two villages remained a single municipality until the first of January 1837. From the seventeenth century the Augustinian convent remains, rebuilt to a design by Giuseppe Zimbalo and finished in 1662; in the mother church, instead, the sixteenth-century portal was taken apart and put back together piece by piece on the new front.