From the two seas of Taranto to the fiefs of the Muscettola

Taranto · Leporano · Pulsano · Torricella · TA

We start from the old town of Taranto, which the Municipality describes as an island, and continue, on a route of our own making, towards three municipalities in the same province. The theme that had been proposed to us, “city and sea”, holds only in part: the sources read speak of the sea for Taranto, Leporano and Pulsano, and of Torricella they say only that it has a seaside locality, Torre Ovo. Two threads, on the other hand, really hold: the towers and fortresses against raids from the sea, which the sources recall at Leporano and Pulsano, and the flight from the coast to escape the pirates that the Municipality of Torricella places at the origin of the town; and a family, the Muscettola, princes of Leporano, whom the municipal pages also find at Pulsano and Torricella. The grouping is ours. It is a journey for those who want to read a layered city and then a countryside of castles and fiefs.

The route

Day 1 — Taranto, the old town

The day opens in Piazza Castello, in front of two columns and a fragment of a third: this is what remains, according to the Municipality, of a temple dedicated to a goddess, which the record dates to the first quarter of the 6th century BC. On the same square, at the southern tip of the island, stands the Castello Aragonese: the Municipality says it was inaugurated in 1492 on the site of a Byzantine fortress, quadrangular in plan with four towers, named after San Cristoforo, San Lorenzo, the Annunziata and the Bandiera. The chapel of San Leonardo is “probably” the work of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and by tradition the marriage of Maria d'Enghien and Ladislao di Durazzo was celebrated there, two names we will meet again at Pulsano. The castle is still today, writes the Municipality, a base of the Marina Militare in every respect. The Cattedrale di San Cataldo was once dedicated to Maria Maddalena; it was remodelled in the 10th century under Nikephoros II Phokas, and the remains of the patron saint, the Municipality recounts, were found near the baptistery in 1071. On the western side, San Domenico Maggiore, completed around 1360 and once called San Pietro Imperiale, rests on the remains of a large Greek temple. Not far away is Via Cava: originally a natural depression, levelled already in the Greek period, in the Middle Ages it was dug with underground rooms that served as oil mills, cellars and granaries, many of them owned by nobles, clergy and religious orders. In the upper part lies a funerary hypogeum, probably arranged in the Middle Ages by reusing areas quarried in the Greek period; it can be visited by booking. The next day one leaves the island.

Day 2 — Taranto towards Leporano

One leaves the old town by the Ponte di Pietra, built in 1883 with three arches over 115 metres: it replaces, writes the Municipality, a 10th-century Byzantine bridge with seven arches destroyed by a flood, and from here one looks at the Mar Piccolo and the Mar Grande. On Corso Due Mari, in the Borgo, the bronze Monumento al Marinaio of 1974 shows two sailors saluting the ships passing through the navigable canal between the two seas; it commemorates the fallen, in particular those of the night of 11 November 1940. The railing of the corso, from the early 20th century, bears the star and the coat of arms of the Savoy navy.

Leporano receives few lines, because its municipal website has no history pages. The Regione places between Porto Saturo and Porto Perone the Parco Archeologico di Saturo, with finds from the Neolithic to the Roman period and a Roman villa of the imperial age, with residential rooms and baths, and red and white chequerboard mosaics; inside the park stands the Torre Saturo, from the second half of the 16th century, a post against pirates. On the coast the Batteria Cattaneo, says the Municipality without giving its date, was built to watch over the Ionian stretch. In the town stands the Castello Muscettola: a Swabian watchtower of the 12th-13th century, a late Angevin keep, walls in the 16th century, the transformation into a palace in the 17th century; from 1617, writes the Municipality, it belonged to the Muscettola princes, lords of the fief until the mid-19th century. Their name leads to the next stop.

Day 3 — Pulsano and Torricella

Along the coast road of Pulsano, in the Bosco Caggioni, the Torre Castelluccia belonged, according to the municipal portal, to the anti-pirate system of the Spanish Viceroyalty, between the Torre Saturo and the vanished Torre Rossa. An excavation in 1948 brought to light a settlement of the Bronze and Iron Ages; today the tower, writes the portal, is badly deteriorated. The materials from those excavations and from the Roman villa of Luogovivo are in the Museo Archeologico, on the first floor of the convent of the Riformati, commissioned by Nicolò Sergio Muscettola, prince of Leporano and Pulsano. In the town the Castello De Falconibus began, writes the Regione, as a single square tower; in 1435 Marino Delli Falconi enlarged it with five towers of different shapes and heights. The Municipality bought it in 1912 and kept the town hall there until 1993. Next to it, the Torre dell'Orologio has a Milanese mechanism by Cesare Fontana. Every summer the “Polso Sano” pageant recalls the 1407 visit of Ladislao and Maria d'Enghien. The Mulino Scoppetta milled from 1883 to 1970; in 1911 it received Swiss Bühler rollers, and in 2001 the Ministry placed it under protection.

Torricella, according to its municipal page, was born around the 11th century from shepherds and farmers who left the coast to escape Saracen pirates. It has a 12th-century crypt of the Santissima Trinità and a tuff castle with five towers, which in 1780 Giovanni Antonio Muscettola of Leporano bought together with the fief and which, having later passed to the Municipality, was opened in 1988. Torricella has been an autonomous municipality since 31 July 1954, after belonging to Sava and then to Lizzano; the municipal page calls it, after Statte, the youngest municipality in the province. Towards the sea lies the frazione of Monacizzo, whose name, according to the Municipality, recalls the Basilian monks who are said to have founded a hamlet there in the 10th century. The journey, in our proposal, ends here.

DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 12 defects corrected · not approved