Lizzano

In the countryside of Lizzano there are trulli — here they say truddu — and they are worth looking at once you know how they came about: they are made of the stones taken out of the ground to make it fit for cultivation. The farmer cleared his field, and with what was left under his feet he raised, all dry and without mortar, a shelter for his tools, his animals and himself. The obstacle became the house. The same goes for the dry-stone walls that cut across the fields and for the specchie, the ancient stone mounds; among them stand a good twenty-odd masserie, the olive groves, the almond and fig orchards and above all the vineyards, for Lizzano is a land of primitivo and negroamaro and its denomination carries the village's name.

The other thing to look at is a river that is barely there: the Ostone, lu Stoni, a seasonal watercourse. On its banks, and especially near the sea, there have come to light over time pottery, ceramics, gold, votive shrines, necropolises and whole Neolithic villages, among them the one at Bagnàra, which even had a defensive wall. North of the village the river enters a gravina, and in the rock faces there open cave settlements of Byzantine date, used as refuge during the Saracen raids and later as hiding places in the time of brigandage: the same caves, centuries apart, for the same reason. With the reclamation works of the late nineteenth century the Ostone was put to work and served to drain the Rotonda marsh through the canale dei Cupi, a tributary built on purpose. The springs that fed it naturally, however, are gone: they have been wiped out by the unrestrained spread of artesian wells. For the rest, the earth here has moved only once, on 20 February 1743: the earthquake that destroyed Francavilla Fontana and Nardò left the marquis's palace at Lizzano leaning.