Pulsano

In 1407 Maria d'Enghien, countess of Lecce and princess of Taranto, and Ladislao di Durazzo, the Angevin king of Naples, had just married. Having spent their wedding night at Taranto, they came here on their honeymoon, guests of the baron Marino De Falconibus: they stayed in the castle, met the barons of the Salento, amused themselves with boar hunting, walked through the streets of the town and in the evening watched the contests at the game of the wrist between the soldiers of Pulsano and the townsmen. That game is the most accredited explanation of the town's name: Pulsano would come from «ab insigni abitantium pulsu», from the notable wrist of its inhabitants, and from the old tournaments of polso sano — what today is called arm-wrestling — which the nobles and the well-off arranged at Christmas, at Easter and sometimes at the vintage and the harvest, between the soldiers and the strongest men of the place; and it is held that the Greeks, landing here, found the game already being played. There are five other explanations — a Roman patrician who summered here, the verb to repel, the north gate where deserters were hanged, the coot of the old marshes — but the town has chosen this one: since 1982 it holds a historical re-enactment called Polso Sano, with parades in traditional dress and contests between the quarters, and what it re-enacts is precisely that honeymoon.

In 1480 the men of Pulsano went to Otranto. The Turks had landed, and the king of Naples put Giovanni Antonio Delli Falconi, son of the lord of this castle, in command down there, together with the Tarantine Francesco Zurlo. The two captains tried to fight, tried to negotiate, and in the end shut the townspeople inside the walls and held out for two weeks. Otranto fell. Among the very many dead were the forty soldiers of Pulsano and Delli Falconi himself. Before leaving they had been blessed in the church of the Carmine, which is the oldest sacred place in the town and is still standing. Otranto was freed a year later, on the eighth of September 1481, and that is the day Pulsano keeps the feast of the Madonna dei Martiri, for its own dead. And in that same year something strange happened: the sultan Mehmed II, already gravely ill and shortly before his death, had a statue of the Madonna dei Martiri delivered to the castle of Pulsano, in honour of what the men of this town had done at Otranto. That statue is still carried in procession. The castle they set out from is called De Falconibus, and at the beginning it was a single square tower, a hunting lodge; around 1100 the people of the coast, driven inland by the pirate raids, took refuge in it, because from the sea it could not be seen; the De Falconibus bought it half-ruined and added the other four towers. One of them, Renzo, died in 1326 defending Pulsano from a landing, on a stretch of shore that has been called Terrarossa ever since.