Zollino is one of the nine municipalities of the Grecìa Salentina, and in Griko it is called Tsuḍḍinu. The name, according to the most accepted explanation, comes from Soletino, that is little Soleto: and what supports it is that the two villages share the same emblem, the sun. Two stories are told about its origin: that it was founded by the Greeks of Iapygia, or that the inhabitants of nearby Apigliano moved here, having fled — legend says — an invasion of vipers. What is certain is that people were here much earlier: two menhirs and a dolmen remain.
The Greek rite was practised at Zollino until the sixteenth century. How people lived here, on the other hand, is told entirely by the tax register of 1746: 290 inhabitants in sixty-six houses, a single occupation, farming, and barely thirty-four people who had passed fifty. The population doubled in the nineteenth century and went on growing until the nineteen-sixties, when many left for Switzerland and Germany; some came back twenty years later. In the village there survives an underground oil mill, cut below street level.
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📅 Every year, on 22 and 23 August (Saint Anthony also on 13 June)
On 22 and 23 August Zollino, a municipality of 2,058 inhabitants in the province of Lecce, celebrates Saint Anthony of Padua: the date recalls 1898, when the saint's statue was carried in procession to calm a hurricane.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Zollino, but an easy day trip away.
