Vernole

Vernole was split into two halves for seven hundred years. On 15 August 1115 the Norman Goffredo, count of Lecce and Ostuni, gave the bishop of Lecce Formoso Lubelli «half of the casale of Vernole, which is called of San Lorenzo», to pay for the restoration of the greater church of Lecce; the gift was confirmed by Constance of Hauteville on 23 November 1195, and that half stayed with the bishop's church until 1806. The other half followed the dynastic fortunes of Lecce until the Aragonese, in 1463, assigned the fief to the Tarantini; then it passed to the Pagano, the Saluzzo, the Saraceno and at last the Bernardini, last feudatories also until 1806. The village, meanwhile, had moved: after continual Saracen raids the inhabitants left the old site, and of the first nucleus only the ruins of the little church of San Lorenzo remain. As for the name, the local historian Eugenio De Carlo in 1941 took it from the Latin verno, to sprout, to be spring, for the mildness of the climate; Giacomo Arditi in 1879 from vernatio, the shedding of an old skin, for the rebirth of the people of San Lorenzo; and tradition says more simply ver in olae, spring among the olive trees.

In March 1865, with the law on the administrative unification of the Kingdom, five comuni ceased to exist and were annexed to the largest: Acaya, Acquarica di Lecce, Pisignano, Strudà and Vanze are today the frazioni of Vernole. Acaya keeps its sixteenth-century fortified citadel. Older still is what lies in the triangle between Acquarica, Acaya and Pisignano: menhirs and specchie, and at Pozzo Seccato, near Acquarica, the excavations of the Università del Salento have brought to light a Messapian fortified farmstead built at the end of the fourth century before Christ. On the coast the comune holds the state nature reserve of Le Cesine, run by the WWF: it is one of the last marshy areas of the belt that once ran from Otranto to Brindisi, with the ponds Salapi and Pantano Grande fed by the rains and kept from the sea by a cordon of dunes.