Crispiano

Crispiano grew out of a karst gorge, the Vallone, which has been lived in since prehistory. In the Middle Ages there was a casale here and an abbey; then, from the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, the caves of the gorge began to be inhabited again, more and more permanently — they had been the refuge of Basilian monks, they became the houses of peasants, and they are the foundation the town stands on today. Which is young: the first houses outside the gorge went up only after the middle of the eighteen hundreds, and Crispiano became a comune of its own only in November 1919, detaching itself from Taranto. The country around it is known for its farms: they call it the land of the hundred masserie.

Those farms were fortified for a reason. At the beginning of the eighteen hundreds this countryside was the refuge of don Ciro Annicchiarico, a priest who had turned brigand, and the history of that period, here, is the history of the struggle between brigandage and the fortified farms. Older still is the hill of the Amastuola, where a Dutch university has dug and found a proto-historic village alive from the eighth to the fifth century before Christ. As to where the name comes from, nobody agrees: from the saints Crispus and Crispinian; from a Roman centurion, a Crispius, who is in the comune's arms and to whom this land is said to have been granted for his valour in battle; from a Roman matron, Crispinilla, held to have been Nero's lover; or, by a recent study, from callis plana, a flat drove road.