Poggiardo

The town says it was born by decision of an ox. The survivors of three hamlets — Soranello, Puzze and Casicalvi — could not agree on where to build the new village, and entrusted the choice to the animal: where it stopped, there they would build. On the town's coat of arms there is still an ox at pasture. The documents say that Poggiardo began to grow above all from the end of the fourteenth century: it had sided with the Angevins against Manfred and after the Angevin victory it drew advantages from it, then it entered the principality of Taranto and was given walls and a castle. The name perhaps comes from a personal name, Boiardus, or perhaps from Podium Arduum, the steep knoll, which would be the ridge the town stands on. In its territory lies the hamlet of Vaste, the ancient Bastae: a Messapian centre probably founded in the seventh century before Christ and destroyed by William the Bad in 1147.

In 1455 the prince of Taranto Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo gave the fief with a baronial title to Agostino Guarini, and the Guarini stayed until the abolition of feudal tenure in 1806, becoming dukes in 1698: theirs is the tower of the ducal palace, still standing. After the destruction of Castro the bishop Luca Antonio Resta moved the episcopal residence here. But the date the town holds dearest is another: in the mother church of San Salvatore, on the Sunday in albis of the twenty-eighth of March 1628, Joseph of Cupertino was ordained priest, the friar who according to his contemporaries rose from the ground, today the patron of students; since the twenty-ninth of July 1963 he has been co-patron of Poggiardo. Around the houses the ridge is made of centuries-old olive groves, holm-oak woods, scrub with wild orchids, karst caves — and bauxite quarries.