Squinzano

In 1560 a royal decree made Squinzano a free demesne comune: it answered to the crown and not to a lord. In 1623, for reasons of money, the town had to sell that title back and become a feudal comune again; the buyer was the Spanish nobleman Giovanni Enriquez, whose son later obtained the title of prince of Squinzano. Squinzano, after all, had been born twice. The name comes from the consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus, who during the wars with Taranto is said to have built his private house here: from Quintianum to Quinzano, and finally to Squinzano. But for centuries it stayed a tiny abandoned casale, and it filled up only when it took in a great number of refugees from the nearby Messapian city of Valesio, destroyed in 1157 by the Norman king William the Bad.

Giovanni Enriquez, who loved the Franciscan order, had a convent built beside the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie; and in 1627 the church of the Santissima Annunziata was completed, the building of which had been urged on by the apparition of the Madonna to a woman of the town, one Maria Manca. The mother church of San Nicola was built between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries over an older place of worship with a crypt, served by Basilian monks: it has a front of carparo stone with oval decorations like those of the Sedile of Lecce, and a high altar bought second-hand, in 1828, from the convent of Santa Chiara in Naples. The comune also owns a piece of territory detached from the rest, an administrative island shut inside the comune of Torchiarolo. And since 1999 it has borne the title of city: for the occasion the arms were to be changed, but the official drawing of the new ones is still being made, and meanwhile the town goes on using the old.