Sannicola

Until the eighteenth century all this land was called Rodogallo, a Greek name meaning «place of the beautiful roses», and later it was divided into Rodogallo magno and Rodogallo parvo. The Basilian monks were here for a long time, and to them are owed the abbey of San Mauro and the church of San Salvatore. Today's village, on the other hand, was born in 1715 around the church of San Nicola, of Basilian origin and rebuilt in 1640 by Domenico Musurù: it was poor peasants, authorised by the great landowners, who put up a few scattered houses in exchange for guarding and cultivating the land. In the course of the century Rodogallo took the name of the church's titular saint and became San Nicola, then Villa San Nicola for almost all of the nineteenth century; and when the comune finally came, the name had become Sannicola, all in one word, through a mistake.

The inhabitants had asked for autonomy in 1830, because too much road separated them from Gallipoli, of which they were a frazione. The request was refused, while the other Gallipoli frazione, Villa Picciotti — today Alezio — obtained its own comune as early as 1854. It took two more petitions, in 1899 and in 1905, and the law of the fifth of April 1908. But when it came to drawing the boundaries, the administrators of Gallipoli demanded that a very thin strip of coast be left outside the new comune: losing the duty on the fish landed along that stretch of sea would have cost too much. So Sannicola includes most of Lido Conchiglie and has no direct outlet on the sea. Of the Byzantine past there remain the little church of San Mauro, in squared blocks of tufa, with three naves and entirely frescoed, and San Salvatore, first named in 1310: today it is swallowed into the ruins of a nineteenth-century farmstead, used as a store and as a dump and stripped of its stones.