The name comes from trees: where Salice Salentino stands today there once grew a forest of willows, which did very well on the clay soil here. The first document naming it is a diploma of Roger the Norman, duke of Apulia, of 10 April 1102, and the place appears there as Oppidum Salicis. In 1392 the fief passed to Raimondo Orsini Del Balzo, who built his residence here: it is a ruin, but the people of Salice go on calling it the House of the King. In 1485 Ferdinand I of Naples took the fief back because the baron Salvatore Zurlo had taken part in the conspiracy of the barons, and sold it on; and in 1591 Philip II of Spain made Giovanni Antonio Albricci marquis of Salice, who according to the chronicles had governed the place in exemplary fashion.
What those lords left behind, however, still works. Albricci had the convent of the Friars Minor built between 1587 and 1597 to discharge a vow, and raised it around the little church of the Madonna del Soccorso, which became the presbytery of the new church of the Visitation. And it was another feudal lord, Gabriele Agostino Enriquez, who around 1662 instituted the fair of the Madonna della Visitazione, still held today on 2 July — and this while the people of Salice were repeatedly revolting against the heavy dues imposed by the Spanish government and by the lords themselves. The mother church, by contrast, they had to rebuild on their own: it collapsed on 3 March 1689, the rebuilding began in November of that same year and it was opened for worship only in 1713. The bell tower ends in a majolica dome.
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📅 Every year, on 4 October
On 4 October Salice Salentino celebrates Saint Francis of Assisi; the village also hosts the Fair of Our Lady of the Visitation, established around 1662 by the feudal lord Gabriele Agostino Enriquez and still held today on 2 July.
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