Presicce-Acquarica

Presicce is called the city of hypogea, because under the streets lie the trappeti: oil mills dug out of the tufa rock, with beaten-earth floors, where oil was made for centuries. They began to dig them between the eleventh and the thirteenth century on the slopes of the Serra di Pozzomauro, and later, once the Arnea marsh had been drained, the work moved downhill: most of the trappeti in fact lie along the road that linked the village's first two nuclei. In piazza Villani there were criers who fixed the price, and among the merchants they still remember the Venetian Pietro David, who dealt with half the world. Then comes the interesting point: those rooms were too small to hold the new mills and presses, and since they could not be enlarged, towards the end of the nineteenth century they were abandoned. Some became rubbish dumps or cellars, those in the countryside sheepfolds and stables. They have come down to us precisely because nobody touched them again: since the nineties they have been cleaned out, and today they can be visited.

Water, here, is the reason for everything: the village lies in a valley full of shallow water tables, and on the arms of Presicce there is a deer drinking at a spring. The first settlement, though, stood on the hill to the south-west, and was called Pozzomauro: of it there remain a tower built against Saracen raids, a Basilian crypt cut into the rock and a bare little church, because in 1481 the Saracens destroyed it and the people moved down. The name too would come from there, from the Latin praesidium, that is, a military post. Of the feudal history one night above all is remembered: the prince leaned out of the castle to greet the celebrating crowd and a masked man, among the people, shot him dead. Legend places it at the carnival of 1655, but the episode happened in November, at the feast of Saint Andrew; and from that mask comes the nickname of the people of Presicce, the Mascarani. The motive is said to have been the ius primae noctis, a supposed right of the feudal lord which has, however, never been documented. The comune, meanwhile, is new: Presicce and Acquarica del Capo merged in 2019 and do not yet have a shared coat of arms — for now they use those of the two former villages side by side.