Palagianello

Before the nineteenth century Palagianello was a comune of its own. It was so by virtue of the pragmatics of Ferrante I of Aragon, as an Università, and the proof lies in a list: that of the Università liable to pay seven grana per hearth to maintain the companies of the Cavallari, who patrolled the coast, gave the alarm to the corporals of the towers and ran to warn the threatened inhabitants. For Palagianello the tower of reference was Torre Lato, which is still there. At the head of the «Magnifica Università di Paligianello» was the mayor with three elected men, and every 14 August the sitting mayor summoned the citizens by proclamation into the church of San Pietro Apostolo, which belonged to the comune by ancient possession and was the only place where people gathered to deal with public business: the elections were held the next day. Then the laws of 1806 abolished, along with the fiefs, the Università as well, and places under a thousand inhabitants could be joined to their neighbours: Palagianello became a frazione of Palagiano, which administered the income of its woods and pastures and gave it little in return.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the discontent turned into a demand: either to pass to Mottola or to be a comune again. The proposal was put off time after time, until an outsider took a hand. Davide Lenge, a former seminarian from Ginosa and a scrivener here, made the people of Palagianello care about public affairs, and the Peasants' League and the Consumers' Cooperative were founded. On 9 October 1906 the council of Palagiano at last put the question on its agenda and approved it; the law of 6 June 1907 gave Palagianello back its comune. The arms, settled in 1913, carry a grazing cow with a suckling calf, silver on a blue field, and a Latin motto, Medicina Dei, which is what the name of the archangel Raphael means. And in the ravine below, on 10 May 1962, on the report of two shepherds of the Manisi family, the shelter that bears their name was found: the first Palaeolithic site of the province of Taranto, with tools of Neanderthals and of Sapiens.