Patron saint festival In 310 days
Our Lady of Perpetual Help, patron of the coastal towers
📅 Every year, on 21 August
Porto Cesareo celebrates Our Lady of Perpetual Help on 21 August, in the church dedicated to her.
On the seabed, in front of the village, lie seven monolithic columns of cipollino marble: they are what is left of Portus Sasinae, the Roman landing from which the produce of the interior was shipped. Even earlier, at Scalo di Furno, there was a village and an area sacred to the goddess Thana. Then pirates and marsh emptied everything, until around the year one thousand the Basilian monks came and built an abbey.
The village of today is young. In the eighteenth century it filled up again in summer because of a tuna fishery, which drew fishing families here, mostly from Taranto; the first permanent nucleus dates from the mid-nineteenth century, and it has been an autonomous comune, separate from Nardò, only since 1975. Along the coast four sixteenth-century towers remain: the Cesarea, the largest, commanded all the others.
The Porto Cesareo guide
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Porto Cesareo 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Porto Cesareo
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Porto Cesareo, but an easy day trip away.
certosa di Parma 📍 Parma · 8.3 km The charterhouse of Stendhal's title, now a police school and rarely open. Parma Baptistery 📍 Parma · 11 km Benedetto Antelami’s pink marble masterpiece, a European landmark bridging Romanesque and Gothic design in Parma. arco di San Lazzaro 📍 Parma · 9.8 km Arch of San Lazzaro in Parma, built in 1628 on via Emilia Est, restored in 2005. chiesa di San Sepolcro 📍 Parma · 11 km The Holy Sepulchre canons' church on the via Emilia, with a coffered ceiling. abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista 📍 Parma · 11 km Correggio's second dome in Parma, and the Benedictine pharmacy with its jars in rows. teatro Farnese 📍 Parma · 12 km The Farnese wooden theatre in the Pilotta, inaugurated with a naval battle in the stalls.