History

Porto Badisco is not only a natural gem admired by many travellers, among them the well-known painter Philipp Hackert, but also the setting of countless human events.

In its inlet people have lived since prehistory: the Grotta dei Cervi (Deer Cave), discovered in 1970, was already in the Eneolithic a point of reference for the tribal populations scattered across the surrounding territories, who on certain days of the year gathered there to celebrate initiation rites of passage, as emerges from the mysterious bat-guano pictographs scattered over the underground rocks that have made it famous throughout the world.

The name Badisco, echoing the Greek root “bathùs”, means “not deep” (shallow) and reveals by itself the nature of the place and its special ability to reassure people and welcome small vessels, as already noticed by the greatest Salento humanist of the 16th century, Galateo, in his geographical work “De Situ Japigiae”, where he described the harbour as the southern limit of the most delightful valley of Badisco, furrowed by gurgling streamlets.

Porto Badisco is the only inlet, from Capo d’Otranto to Capo di Leuca, able to offer, by its natural shape, shelter from the raging winds of the northern quadrant. Over the millennia it has been the longed-for destination of every sailor caught offshore or close to the coast in that stretch of sea by the sudden fury of the mistral, the tramontana and the grecale. It is no coincidence that some very ancient commentators on Virgil identified in Porto Badisco the hidden “Portus Veneris” to which the helmsman Palinurus, crossing the Strait of Otranto, safely steered the ship that had set out, with favourable winds, from the Ceraunian coast to carry Aeneas and Anchises to Italy. The numerous amphorae of various ancient periods found on the seabed, especially outside the harbour mouth, attest to the unlucky fate of those who, over the centuries, failed to overcome the fury of the elements and reach safety.

Porto Badisco was also a place of violence: how many times were its shores walked by crews, larger or smaller, of pirates and raiders, above all Saracens and Muslims, who, going up the ancestral riverbed that shapes the inlet, reached the inland hamlets to carry out raids, plunder and abductions of men, women and children destined to feed the slave trade in the markets of the East and North Africa? We cannot know, but certainly on 13 June 1630 150 “Turks” who landed at Badisco sacked Cerfignano, Minervino and Cocumola, where the population barricaded itself in the tower and defended itself heroically until the arrival of the armed coastal watch, which managed to kill some pirates, capture others and put the rest of the band to flight. And again on 19 July 1712 a sizeable gang of Montenegrin pirates landed there and, climbing the steep sides of the gorge (the “canalone”), reached Uggiano to attempt raids, but was forced to hurry back by the violent reaction of the inhabitants, who inflicted heavy losses of troops and officers on them. In late July 1480 Badisco also offered its shores for the landing of a large armed Turkish contingent that besieged Otranto from the south, plundering and depopulating the Otranto hinterland. At the beginning of the 19th century its beach even hosted an armed clash between about twenty young men of Uggiano enrolled in the Civic Guard and led by mayor Luigi Pirrone, and an Anglo-Sicilian contingent landed with the intention of inciting the local populations against the French occupiers: the heroic momentum of the young men of Uggiano, culminating in the throwing of stones after their ammunition had run out, forced the soldiers to climb hurriedly back onto the ship from which they had landed and to leave the harbour quickly.

To protect itself from Ottoman expansionism, Charles V had a mighty watchtower, armed with cannon, built at Porto Badisco between 1567 and 1575. The tower, the most majestic on the stretch of coast from Palascìa to Santa Cesarea, stood between the contemporary tower of S. Emiliano to the north and, to the south, the Torre del Vento, or of Porto Fondo, better known as the tower of Minervino because it was mainly that universitas (municipality) that was burdened with its maintenance and with the monthly pay of the “corporals”, “scoltieri” (lookouts) and “cavallari” (mounted guards). The tower of Badisco was built at the expense of the universitas of Uggiano, which for over three centuries bore the costs of maintenance and coastal watch, also taking care of the sanitary cordons in periods of plague. It was almost completely destroyed during the Anglo-French conflict in the summer of 1810 by the batteries of the English frigate Leonidas, commanded by Lieutenant J.W. Bazalgette, engaged in the naval blockade in the Ionian Sea meant to prevent supplies from reaching the French troops stationed on the mainland. The last blocks of the glorious tower, located in the present garden of the villa known as “La Torre”, owned by the Papadia family, were removed in the early 1900s.

But Porto Badisco has also been a place of industrious activity. The Romans, after the conquest of the 5th century BC, had already made it a secondary port for shipping the agricultural products of the hinterland. In the early Middle Ages the Norman crown assigned some properties in this locality to the coenobitic community headed by the abbey of San Nicola di Casole, to which belonged the little church of Santa Maria commonly called “la Sodia” (probably from the Greek “Eusodia”, which refers to the episode of the Presentation of the Virgin at the temple), located in today’s Piazzetta Consiglio and served until the early 1800s by the chapter of Uggiano; among these properties was the small salt pan, in the place now commonly called “Tagliate”. The “Salinaci” cave (known today as the “Cave of Aeneas”), which served as a shelter for sailors during loading and unloading and as a place of quarantine for crews in periods of plague, owes its name precisely to its proximity to the small salt pan.

The activities carried out at Porto Badisco were often illegal: the smuggling of salt, a monopoly commodity since the times of the Angevin and Aragonese monarchies, was practised for centuries along its cliffs despite customs control and the heavy judicial repression that continued until the dawn of the 20th century.

To the monks of the abbey also belonged, for centuries, the freshwater lake behind the beach of Badisco, used as a fishpond until the 1930s, when major hydraulic reclamation works were carried out that radically changed the territory.

Commercial activities reached their peak between the 17th and 18th centuries, when the thinning-out of Turkish raids and improved production techniques favoured an increase in grain harvests and the resumption of exports. In that period, and until the introduction of export duties in the mid-1700s, the little harbour of the “Tagliate” filled with vessels of every origin, with sailors, carts, porters (“bastasi”) and caulkers, and the levelling of the cliff began, to make it easier to load goods onto the vessels anchored in the harbour under the protection of the tower’s artillery.

From the mid-1700s trade went into a long and steady decline, and the locality was reduced to a small harbour of a tiny band of fishermen, which over time became ever smaller. At the end of the 1800s a first building was erected to house the customs guards and the first huts appeared, up to the building expansion of the post-war period and the rebirth, from the 1970s, as a tourist resort.