San Marzano di San Giuseppe

San Marzano di San Giuseppe — Shën Marcani in Arbëresh — was founded at the end of the fifteenth century by Albanians who had come from the other shore of the Adriatic, and today it is, by number of inhabitants, the largest of the Albanian colonies in Italy. It is also the only one of the fourteen villages founded or refounded by Albanians in the province of Taranto to have kept the mother tongue along with the customs and usages of the country of origin; the Byzantine rite, on the other hand, died out over the centuries. Albanian here is protected by the national law on linguistic minorities of 1999, and the town council uses it in official documents too: it is not a language for festivals, it is a language for paperwork.

The name, by contrast, was chosen by a mayor. In the Middle Ages the documents write castrum Sancti Marzani; after the unification of Italy the government asked comuni with identical names to add something that would tell them apart, and on 7 September 1866 the mayor Francesco Paolo Cavallo decreed that «di San Giuseppe» should be added to the old name, for the cult of the saint and so as not to be confused with San Marzano sul Sarno and San Marzano Oliveto. Beneath all this, the territory has been a boundary line for millennia: in Contrada Neviera there remain the traces of a massive wall that may have marked the limit between the Greek area of Taranto and the Messapian area of Oria, and in the walls of the ravine, near the rock sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie, there are caves dug as tombs in the late Bronze Age and then lived in again, in the early Middle Ages, as houses.