Taurisano · Ruffano · Supersano · Collepasso · LE
Four towns of the Salento, all in the province of Lecce, two of which the sources place on the Serre salentine: Ruffano on the flank of its Serra, Supersano with its masserie at the foot of the serre. The thread the records truly support is not oil but the Church: Taurisano, Supersano and Torrepaduli were already under the bishop of Ugento before 1818, and still are today; and it seems to us that at Taurisano, Ruffano and Supersano the Greek world surfaces, with a sundial that Wikipedia describes with the hours in Latin and Greek characters, priests of the Greek rite, Greek inscriptions in a crypt. Oil enters only as landscape, in the olive trees of the Serre and in a centuries-old olive grove of the Parco Paduli; of greenhouse cultivation there is no trace. It is a journey for those who accept small towns and uneven documentation: Ruffano is rich in records, Supersano and Collepasso have few, and the account respects this.
At a glance
Duration. 3 days.
The route
Day 1 — Taurisano
On the façade of Santa Maria della Strada, a church that Wikipedia dates between the mid-thirteenth and the early fourteenth century, in Apulian Romanesque forms, the lintel of the portal bears an Annunciation and the portal has two crouching animals; beside the bell tower a Byzantine sundial marks the hours in Latin and Greek characters. The diocese of Ugento, which lists it among its sanctuaries, on corso Umberto I, describes it as a medieval church with an important façade, and to that façade an essay by Margherita Pasquale, published in 2013, is devoted, which we have not read. The clergy and faithful of Taurisano, the diocese recalls, were already under the bishop of Ugento before 1818, and still are today. In this town, around 1585, according to Rice University's Galileo Project, Giulio Cesare Vanini was born, the son of an official and a Spanish noblewoman. He studied in Naples from 1599, became a Carmelite, passed through Padua, fled to England in 1612, then Genoa, Paris, Toulouse; the De admirandis, published in 1616, cost him his condemnation, and on 9 February 1619 he was executed in Toulouse under the pseudonym Pompeo Uciglio. He was among the first, the same source notes, to treat nature as a machine governed by laws. A century and a half later the town shows another authority: in the Palazzo Lopez y Royo a record of the Ministry of Culture registers a municipally owned relief with the coat of arms and the inscription “MICHAEL LOPEZ Y ROYO / TERTIUS DUX / TAURISANI / A.D. 1770”; Wikipedia dates to 1770 the completion of the Palazzo Ducale, above an Angevin castle. In the territory the same encyclopedia indicates the megalith of Specchia Silva, the menhir of Sanjetti and the remains of the Byzantine chapel of San Donato. Taurisano borders Ruffano, the next day's stage.
Day 2 — Ruffano and Torrepaduli
Ruffano lies halfway up the slope: the Ministry of Culture record describes it as a mid-slope settlement on the eastern flank of the Serra that bears its name. In piazza del Popolo the parish church and the Castello Brancaccio stand together; the castle's oldest core, late fifteenth-century, has a quadrangular plan with a central courtyard. The town grew mainly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in towered houses with external stairs, courtyard houses and palatial residences with portals in local stone. Behind those façades lie the changes of fief that the record lists: from the Antoglietta to the Filomarino, then to the Brancaccio; in 1656 Carlo Brancaccio added the baronies of Torre Paduli and Cardigliano, in 1695 the three fiefs were expropriated and bought by his nephew Francesco d'Amore, in 1753 they passed to the Ferrante until the abolition of feudalism. The mother church, dedicated to the Nativity of the Virgin, preserves according to the italia.it portal eighteenth-century canvases by Saverio Lillo and Baroque altars; the diocese recalls the altar of the Sacrament commissioned by the confraternity of the same name, and its historical archive that of the Immacolata of the Grassi family, of 1713. The same diocese records a fact that carries weight: at Ruffano there were priests of the Greek rite until the seventeenth century, while the Capuchins settled there in 1621. The son of a priest of the Greek rite was Scipione Mogavero, born here around 1564: in Naples he met the Jesuits, from 1586 he asked for the missions in India and Japan and there, under the name Francesco Perez, worked alongside Paolo Miki; having escaped capture, he spent the day in an underground dwelling and the night among the faithful, and died in May 1602, not a martyr.
Wikipedia reports in the territory the Grotta della Trinità, frequented from the Neolithic and later by hermit monks, with remains of Byzantine frescoes. At Torrepaduli, the frazione, the Carmelites arrived in 1560; the convent, suppressed by Innocent X in 1652 and restored in 1659, was suppressed again in the French decade, and after 1818, according to the diocese, the sanctuary of San Rocco became a centre of popular devotion. In the fields around, italia.it describes the countryside of the Serre with olive trees, masserie, pajare and truddhi: the masserie are precisely the theme of the following day.
Day 3 — Supersano and Collepasso
Supersano receives fewer lines because the official sources say little about its history; that little, however, explains the landscape. A Ministry of Culture record on the Parco Paduli, of which Supersano is one of the ten municipalities, observes that the masserie at the foot of the serre are found particularly here, along the most frequented roads, in ventilated areas far from the marshy zones where there was malaria; the same record speaks of a centuries-old olive grove of 5,500 hectares and of channels that carry the waters to the vore. Another landscape, by contrast, has vanished: the Bosco Belvedere, writes italia.it, a forest of post-glacial origin that took in sixteen towns, was cleared starting from the second half of the eighteenth century and over the course of the nineteenth. The portal mentions a Museo del Bosco, a Norman castle in the historic centre remodelled in the Renaissance and the eighteenth-century mother church of San Michele, without verifiable dates or feudal lords. On the provincial road to Casarano stands the sanctuary of the Beata Vergine di Coelimanna, of 1746, today a diocesan sanctuary, with a rock-cut crypt that preserves frescoes of saints and Greek and Latin inscriptions; a little beyond the sanctuary, according to the portal, the Parco naturale della Serra di Coelimanna was inaugurated in 2008, to restore the ancient drove roads.
Collepasso, the last stage in our proposal, is the poorest in sources: it does not appear among the municipalities of the diocese of Ugento, its municipal website could not be reached and its history remains to be documented. The italia.it portal indicates a Chiesa Matrice in pietra leccese and carparo, the Cappella della Santissima Trinità, also called dello Spirito Santo, seventeenth-century and for the page the oldest church in the town, the Palazzo Nuovo and the Torre dell'Orologio, and recalls the fiordilatte mozzarella. In dialect, Wikipedia notes, the town is called Culupazzu. The journey ends here, with more questions than dates.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 9 defects corrected · not approved