Travel & Territory
Parabita: the hidden gem in Salento nobody put on the map
There is a kind of place in southern Italy that never makes the travel magazine covers, has no queues outside the bar in the morning, and has not yet sacrificed the quality that famous places trade away for mass tourism: the sense of being somewhere real, lived in by real people, with a history that was not staged for visitors but is simply there - carved into the stone of doorways and painted on the walls of crypts.
Parabita is one of those places. Eight thousand people, province of Lecce, 83 metres above sea level on the northern edge of the Serre Salentine hills. Twenty minutes by car from Gallipoli. Forty from Lecce.
A history that begins before history
The Grotta delle Veneri - a Palaeolithic site within the municipal territory - yielded two small bone statuettes of female figures, the so-called Palaeolithic Venuses, which helped confirm the presence of Cro-Magnon man in the Mediterranean basin. The originals are held at the National Archaeological Museum in Taranto; Parabita's Museo della Preistoria reconstructs the context with documentary material open to the public.
The medieval village was founded in the Norman period - probably around the 12th century - with a defensive wall pierced by four gates: the Porta di Lecce to the north, the Porta di Gallipoli to the west, the Porta Falsa to the east, and a fourth to the south whose name has been lost entirely.
Over the following centuries Parabita passed through the hands of several great feudal families - the Sanseverino, the Orsini Del Balzo, the Ferrari. The Castriota family commissioned the reconstruction of the castle from the architect Evangelista Menga of Copertino, the same hand that worked on the castles of Copertino and Lecce.
