On coins struck here in the third century before Christ the city calls itself Aozen, Ozan — and that name has been read as the land of Zeus. Out of this ground, from the sixth century before Christ, came a bronze Zeus, together with the painted tomb of via Salentina. Another reading of the name, Francesco Ribezzo's, taken up by Antonio Nicolazzo, brings it from Ausentum, from a root meaning «shining», and recalls that in the palaeo-Italic age the Ionian sea was called Ausonium after Ausentum, as the Adriatic was after Adria; a third story, older still, has the city founded by Uxens, a man named in the eighth book of the Aeneid. Around the ninth century before Christ, migrations probably of Illyrian origin settled in this peninsula and, merging with the local peoples, gave rise to the Messapian civilisation; Ugento was one of its largest and most powerful centres, a city-state with a mint of its own, an army of its own, mighty walls and its own harbour on the Ionian, at Torre San Giovanni.
When Rome came, Ugento was the last Messapian city to resist the Roman troops; it was taken by the consul Numerio Fabio Pittore with his legions. Later, in the war against Carthage, it tried again, siding with Hannibal in the vain hope of winning back its ancient autonomy — and it paid for that too. It became a Roman municipium, and around it were founded the villages that are still names here: Paternò, Geminiano, which is today's Gemini, Varano, Pompignano. The Goths destroyed it in 545 and the Saracens in 842, and it was the Basilian monks who set it up again, rebuilding it on top of the acropolis: the city took on a Greek look and new walls. With the Normans, around 1071, the Greek bishopric was replaced by the Latin one, but the two churches, Greek and Latin, lived side by side for about two centuries. In 1195 Ugento was incorporated into the principality of Taranto; in 1537 the Turks sacked it. The last thing to be conquered here was the marsh: the reclamation consortium set up in 1927 dug great basins linked by canals running out to sea, filled the deepest hollows with the spoil, planted conifers on part of what it had gained and farmed the rest — and put an end to malaria.
