Surbo

The territory of Surbo is entirely surrounded by that of Lecce: it is an enclave inside the provincial capital, five kilometres from its centre. For that reason everybody derives the name from the Latin suburbium, the suburb — and it is an elegant, wrong etymology. In Norman times Surbo was not at all the nearest suburb of Lecce: nearer stood the casale of Pettorano, just north-east of the city. The likelier origin is Greek: the Byzantine soùrbon, that is the sorb-apple, the fruit of the sorb tree, which must have been a common wild plant hereabouts. What supports it is the Greek origin of the monks of Cerrate and of San Giorgio, for the casale was born as an offshoot of that very Basilian settlement of San Giorgio.

The first document that names it is a diploma of Tancred of Hauteville of 1180; ten years later Tancred himself gave the casale to his aunt Emma, a Benedictine abbess in Lecce. Then Surbo became a fief of the mayors of Lecce and so it stayed until the sixteenth century: it was a «casale de corpore» of the city, that is it depended on it for its administration and its accounts. Only afterwards did it begin to change hands: in 1643 a Neapolitan nobleman bought it directly from the royal chamber, in 1757 a gentleman from Brindisi, in 1805 a family that held it for a single year, before feudality was abolished. And the arms the comune uses still have elements like those of the city of Lecce. In the church of Santa Maria del Popolo the Romanesque arcading of the oldest facade is interrupted at one corner by the clock turret they added in 1586; and in 1802 a mayor had the rose window replaced by a large window, as the inscription on its frame recalls.