Manduria

Manduria is a Messapian name, and it may mean horses: the root mando- is compared with the Sanskrit mandurā, «enclosure, stable for horses». It is not strange, because in ancient Salento horses were widely bred and a father-Jupiter was venerated, Iuppiter Menzana, to whom horses were sacrificed; and to the same field some trace the name of Cavallino as well. The town appears in Livy and in Pliny the Elder, and in the Tabula Peutingeriana it is written Manduris. It was one of the great Messapian cities, and its wars with Taranto were serious business: in 338 BC, under these walls, Archidamus III, king of Sparta, lost his life fighting on the Tarentine side. Later Manduria sided with Hannibal, and Rome made it pay: the sources speak of thousands of people deported.

In the archaeological park there are three circuits of megalithic walls and the largest Messapian necropolis ever found, with about two thousand five hundred tombs. And then there is the Fonte Pliniano, which is the finest thing of all: a cavern eighteen metres wide and eight high, with a stair of twenty steps cut in the rock and a square skylight in the vault — and right there, at the point where the light comes in, an almond tree has put down its roots. Inside is a basin where the water still runs, always keeping the same level, and it was this that astonished Pliny the Elder, who wrote it down: a lake that does not fall if you empty it nor rise if you pour into it. The explanation is hydrogeological — the cave floor lies at the level of the water table — but the Messapians saw in it a place of worship, probably of a water deity. The town's name, on the other hand, was given back to it by a king: in 1789 Ferdinand of Bourbon abolished the modern name and restored the ancient one. Today Manduria is the capital of Primitivo, the red that went from a blending wine to a flag of the south; and the sea of San Pietro in Bevagna is ten minutes away among the vineyards.