Ruffano

The mother church of Ruffano, dedicated to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, was built between 1706 and 1713 on the site of the old Greek-rite church: here the Latin rite built on top of the Byzantine one, and this is no isolated case, since in the Griko of the Salento the village is still called Rufàna. The Greek substratum is best seen outside the town, on the Serra of Ruffano, where the natural caves have been inhabited since the Palaeolithic and were later turned into Christian places of worship by the Basilians: in the Grotta della Trinità, used since Neolithic times, a community of hermit monks lived from the ninth century, and traces of Byzantine frescoes remain. The new church was wanted by the confraternities of the Rosary and of the Blessed Sacrament, and was raised by the master builders Ignazio and Valerio Margoleo of Martano; the sacristy is of 1716, the clock tower of 1725, and between 1765 and 1776 the Ruffano painter Saverio Lillo filled the walls with canvases and with painted Virtues framing the altars.

Then there is a family one would not expect at Ruffano: the Castriota Scanderbeg, descendants of the Albanian commander. They arrived by marriage: in 1870 Alessandro, son of a Giorgio Castriota Scanderbeg who had been a judge of the Great Criminal Court at Avellino and at Lecce, married Maria Mariglia, daughter of the marquises of Ugento and princes of Ruffano, and came to live in the sixteenth-century palazzo Mariglia, which is still the family residence. Their only son, baptised here on 13 December 1871 and also called Giorgio, obtained the privilege of hearing mass and taking communion in the palace's private chapel — a privilege later extended to the other members of the family and to the servants — and was mayor of the village between 1897 and 1900. On the arms, granted in 1991, there are three small hills with an R above them: they are the serre of the Salento, and in the village they say they stand for the Serra that leads to Supersano, the town itself and the Mucurune. The central one is in flames. The name, on the other hand, would come from a centurion called Ruffo or, more probably, from the Latin rubis: the place was full of brambles.