Avetrana stands on a road that was moved. In Messapian and then Roman times the artery linking Taranto, Manduria, Nardò, Leuca and Otranto ran further north; the change of route was probably Trajan's work, and shortening the road brought a problem, because there were stretches that turned to marsh with the rain. They solved it by digging a canal about two kilometres long, three metres wide and a couple deep, perfectly straight from north to south, which carried the rainwater into the natural channel of San Martino; and the new road was diverted further south. That canal, probably of the first century, is still there east of the village: to the north the tufa quarries have almost wiped it out, to the south it is plain to see, and where it crosses the Nardò road they call it Ponte Rescio. The Avetrana of today stands on the new route. Older is what lies at Masseria della Marina, traces of a village of huts of the sixth millennium before Christ, and at San Francesco, where digging for an aqueduct brought up the remains of a Roman farm villa of the second century before Christ.
The territory was divided into three fiefs, and perhaps more: Vetrana, Ruggiano and Modunato. Ruggiano was probably destroyed by the Saracen raids and joined to Vetrana as early as the fourteenth century, while Modunato entered the comune only in the nineteenth; and until the early nineteenth century the village was called simply Vetrana. In 1481 it passed to the Pagano as the dowry of the daughter of Francesco Montefuscoli, married to Galeotto Pagano, and under them the new mother church and the walls were begun. In 1547 Turkish pirates landed near Torre Columena; in 1587 Carlo Pagano sold Avetrana to Giovanni Antonio Albrizzi; the castle belonged in 1644 to bishop Geronimo di Martino, in 1656 passed to the Romano and then to Michele Imperiale, prince of Francavilla. On 20 February 1743 the Nardò earthquake shook the whole Salento: here it badly damaged the mother church and cracked the Torrione, repaired only at the end of the twentieth century. The sea, which is five kilometres away, is not its own: a tongue of Manduria's territory stops the boundary a kilometre and a half short of the water.
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📅 Every year, on 29 April; 17 January brings the Saint Anthony the Abbot bonfire with blessed bread and animals
Avetrana celebrates Saint Blaise on 29 April. On 17 January, the feast of Saint Anthony the Abbot is held, with a short procession, the blessing of bread and animals, and the lighting of a great bonfire outside the town.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Avetrana, but an easy day trip away.
