San Cassiano

San Cassiano was born out of a destruction: around 1033 the Saracens razed Muro Leccese, and the survivors scattered across the countryside founding new villages. One group stopped here, where a tiny settlement already stood beside the Basilian crypt of the Madonna della Consolazione, cut out of the rock between the ninth and the tenth century. The name comes from the saint: tradition says that Cassian, coming from the East on his way to Imola, of which he would become bishop, halted at this very spot towards the end of the third century.

The fief passed through a very long line of hands, and two of those passages are worth telling: in 1532 baron Marco Antonio Guarini lost it because he had joined the barons' conspiracy against the crown, and later it went to Alfonso Mosco, who was baron of Melpignano. The municipality, though, is very young: for centuries San Cassiano was part of Nociglia, and only in 1975 did a regional law make it independent. Around the village stretches the Paduli park, a sea of olive trees in which centuries-old oaks survive, the last remnant of the old Belvedere wood.