In the territory of Parabita there is the grotta delle Veneri, and the name says what was found there: two statuettes carved in bone — of ox or horse — representing pregnant women, dated between twelve and fourteen thousand years ago. They are the Venuses of Parabita, and they are proof that somebody here, at the end of the Palaeolithic, needed to represent pregnancy. But people had been in these parts much earlier: the flints found in several caves of the area put human presence at about eighty thousand years ago, when the Salento had Neanderthal man. The ground, after all, is karstic and full of cavities, called here vore, which feed the underground streams, since on the surface none runs at all.
The name of the town probably comes from the Greek para-bata, «near a pass»: the first borgo grew on the pass through the Salento ridges crossed by the ancient road from Gallipoli to Otranto, and served to watch over it. For centuries, however, it was told that Parabita descended from an ancient city called Bavota, said to have stood two kilometres to the east. That city never existed: the name comes from the mistake of a copyist who, transcribing the Greek name of Vaste, Βαῡστα, took a sigma for an omicron and created out of nothing a Bauota — and Ptolemy, who in his Geography lists the Messapian cities, never mentions it. The first certain records are of 1220, when Parabita appears as a casale enfeoffed to the baron of Galatone; the walls came later, with four gates, and of one of them, the southern one, the name has been lost.
