San Cesario di Lecce

In Roman times this place was called Castrum Caesaris, in honour of Caesar Augustus: it was a supply station for the veterans, grown out of the villas that appeared after nearby Lupiae — that is Lecce — became a municipium in 87 before Christ. Then Christianity became the state religion, and the name, instead of disappearing, changed owner: the locality was placed under the protection of Saint Caesarius of Terracina, the saint who replaced and Christianised the pagan cult of the Divine Caesars. From Caesar to a saint with the same name, without touching the word. In griko the town is called As Cisàri, and in the Middle Ages it appears as San Cesario in a decree of Tancred, count of Lecce, who gave the territory to the Celestine monks.

Of the saint who gave the name there is also, here, a piece. In the mother church, in a wall cupboard beside the altar dedicated to him, is kept a reliquary of embossed silver from an eighteenth-century Salento workshop containing part of the left humerus of Saint Caesarius, deacon and martyr — to be exact the distal portion, that is the elbow. The bone was brought here in 1724 from the monastery of San Ponziano in Lucca at the instance of Ettore Marulli, duke of San Cesario. Not far off stands instead the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, built between 1320 and 1321 at the will of the priest Michele di Sternatia: the front has been altered, the rose window replaced by a rectangular one and the Romanesque portal by a seventeenth-century one, but inside there is a cycle of frescoes in the Byzantine manner which an inscription in Greek dates to 1329 — above, the story of Christ; below, a long row of saints.