Taviano

For centuries the town was called Ottaviano, as several documents of the fifteen and sixteen hundreds attest, and an inscription of 1483 in the mother church. Then the name lost its head: the initial vowel and the double consonant fell away, and Taviano was what remained. Where Ottaviano itself came from is disputed. The soundest guess is that it is an estate name, that is the name of some owner's farm: from a Latin personal name, Octavilius or Octavellius, with the suffix that marks belonging. The historian Giacomo Arditi preferred instead to derive the whole thing from the passage of the emperor Caesar Octavian through the Salento, but that derivation is highly improbable.

Under the town there is calcareous sand with spring water between three and ten metres down, and this makes Taviano one of the most fertile areas in the province. The town has made use of it: it was a lively centre of flower growing and nursery work, enough to give itself the trademark of city of flowers, and beside the flowers came market gardening, seasonal fruit and early produce, with the wholesale fruit and vegetable market run by the comune. For about ten years, though, the economy has shifted towards tourism, and on the Ionian coast the comune has its own seaside, Mancaversa. In the twelfth century it was the Basilian monks who reclaimed wide stretches of this land, and in the following century they founded an abbey here, Santa Maria del Civo, which has vanished. In 1614 Taviano bought the casale of Melissano and joined it to itself; Melissano stayed one of its hamlets until the first of January 1885, when it was detached and given to Casarano.