Leporano

The foundation myth of Taranto begins here. The stretch of sea that is now Marina di Leporano was the last one crossed in 706 before Christ by the fleet of Phalanthus, who landed in the bay now called Saturo and founded Taras, the first and only Spartan colony of southern Italy. At Punta Perone, between the beach of Porto Pirrone and that of Saturo, the archaeological park gathers remains that run from the sixteenth century before Christ to the Second World War: the ruins of a Roman villa of the third century, the tower of Saturo of the sixteenth, a Roman aqueduct and a Renaissance one. The name of the village, on the other hand, is uncertain: some take it from a Roman leprarium, a hare warren, and indeed the arms carry a rampant hare. Leporano long depended on Pulsano and obtained its autonomy in 1820, though it kept a mayor in common for several years more.

A language border runs through here as well. Leporano is the southernmost place in all Apulia where the schwa is heard: the unstressed final vowels weaken to a blurred sound or fall away altogether, whereas at Pulsano, which begins immediately beyond, conditions are entirely Salentino and the final -u and -i hold. Giovan Battista Mancarella, who made a survey in 1967, noted that the people normally spoke dialect and were marked off from the neighbouring villages by a decided Tarantino accent, and that the speech of Leporano, though like that of Pulsano, tended to muffle the final vowels and to lengthen the tonic ones a great deal. It is likely that Salentino was originally spoken here as at Pulsano, and that it is the last century that has pulled the village towards Taranto: a pull that grows among the young, who go to Taranto for school and for work, and at Gandoli, the northern edge of the comune, which by now makes a single urban area with the city.