Scorrano

The light displays of Scorrano are documented as early as 1549. It is no small detail: it means that for almost five centuries this village has been building with light things made to last a few days and then be taken down, to show itself and others that it had not given up the awareness of an important past. The great feast is that of Saint Domenica, the patron, and it runs from the fifth to the ninth of July: besides the lights there is a fireworks contest, by day and by night, with prizes for the masters of the fire. The mother church, dedicated to Saint Domenica as well, is made of two chronologically different pieces, one of the sixteenth century and one of the seventeenth, with ten altars besides the high one, in polychrome marbles. The ducal palace of the Frisari, which has the look of the first decades of the eighteenth century, stands where an Aragonese castle was before.

On the town's arms, instead, there are three great oaks flown over by an eagle, and that too is a document. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the lower Salento was crossed by the Belvedere wood, a stretch of oaks and Mediterranean scrub that ran from Tricase to Scorrano and further north took the name of Forest of Cutrofiano; to the fief of Scorrano belonged the largest portion, and the wood appears in the arms of several villages that bordered it — Miggiano, Nociglia, Ruffano, Specchia, Supersano. Today shreds of it remain, such as the wood of the Pecorara. In the limestone below open instead the vore, the karst cavities that here are called avisu: the most visited are the Vora della Castagna and the Vora del Genio Civile. The village's name, finally, would come from the praedium Scurranum, the holding of a veteran called Scurra.