San Donato di Lecce

The town lies in the Valle della Cupa, the great karst depression around Lecce, eighteen kilometres from the Adriatic and twenty-two from the Ionian. In Roman times the land was assigned to a centurion named Vilius, and from his name came that of the casale Vigliano; of that time there remains a dam, which gathered the water and made it run down to the centurion's residence. The casale was destroyed in the barbarian age and was born again in the eleventh century with the Normans, entering at once the county of Lecce with a new name: San Donato. On the site of the Roman house they built the Norman castle. But history here begins much earlier: in the territory there are a megalithic specchia, the Neolithic area of Specchiarosa and stretches of Messapian wall, and in the hamlet of Galugnano two menhirs still stand, the one of the Lete and the one of the Curti Vecchi.

The Norman, then Aragonese castle was remade as a palace in the seventeenth century and took the neoclassical front it has today in the works of the nineteenth: it keeps its quadrangular perimeter and the towers at the corners, two of which are still visible while the others have been swallowed into the building. Inside, around the courtyard, there is a portico of column-pillars, rounded in front and squared behind, and above it a loggia with arches decorated with acanthus leaves and pomegranates; on the ground floor and in the cellars the work was done and the stores kept, and an oil mill was in operation. The man who turned the castle into a palace was the baron Pasquale Maiorana, who in 1759 bought the title of duke. On the town's arms there is a lion, and it is a faithful copy of a large sculpture that stood at the entrance of the baronial palace. The mother church, born in Norman times and completely remade, was finished in 1704: pietra leccese, a broken tympanum and a window closed by a stone grate with thirty-six little holes.