Nardò

Nardò means water: the name comes from the Illyrian nar, and refers to the aquifer beneath the territory — in the city's arms, indeed, there is a jet of water. Piazza Salandra is the most surprising baroque drawing room in the Salento after Lecce, with the spire of the Immaculate, the sedile and the honey-coloured facades; but that baroque is a reconstruction. On the twentieth of February 1743 an earthquake struck the city, killing a hundred and fifty people and bringing down almost everything: of San Domenico little more than the facade survived, and the Palazzo dell'Università was rebuilt from scratch. What you look at today is the city that got back up.

A century earlier something worse had happened. In 1647, when Masaniello's revolt reached the provinces, the barons drowned it in blood, and the count of Conversano, Acquaviva, became notorious for it: at the renewed revolt of his Nardò he came with armed men, had the mayor and many citizens hanged, and even four canons, whose severed heads he had set on their own stalls in the cathedral; then he razed a number of houses, sowed them with salt and left marks of infamy on them. They were the same Acquaviva who had made Nardò the cultural centre of the Salento, with its university and its academies, so much so that it was called the new Athens of letters; and who in 1497, having expelled the Jews, had a friary built on the site of the synagogue. Nardò's sea is the park of Porto Selvaggio: pinewood dropping sheer, transparent water and the bay you swim in after a path through the trees, among the finest stretches of coast in Apulia. The negroamaro estates complete the picture.