A pagan legend has it that near Sant'Angelo, in Roman times, there was an altar dedicated to Bacchus, where the patricians of nearby Lupiae met for the Bacchanalia among feasts, dances and revels: from that the place is said to have been called Tripudium, which is precisely the ritual dance. The comune's arms, however, bear three wells. For a long time it was thought that one explanation excluded the other, and in favour of the first there is the form Galateo uses, «in triputeanam villulam», where the root is tri and not tre, as one would expect if three wells were meant. But the three wells really did exist, in one of the two original urban nuclei: to the place called Tripudio a second settlement was later added, the one with the wells, which absorbed the first and made it decay. The two versions are not opposed, they complete each other — and by a curious coincidence Tripudium and Treputium fuse exactly in the name of today.
The first documentary trace is of 1190, when king Tancred, having become count of Lecce, assigned all the casali of his county to the bishop of Lecce. Trepuzzi grew as the neighbouring casale of Terenzano decayed. The fief went to the Acquaviva d'Aragona, counts of Conversano, and was several times sequestered by the royal treasury for want of direct heirs, until in 1753 a duke who was already governing it bought it. The mother church was built in the seventeenth century over a smaller building and was dedicated to saint Peter the apostle: it became the church of the Assumption only from 1792, and on its high altar it has a great canvas of the Assumption commissioned by an eighteenth-century mayor. On 15 August 2020, the day of the Assumption, the archbishop of Lecce proclaimed Trepuzzi Civitas Mariae, a title in perpetual memory of that devotion.
