Ugento: what to see, castle, museum and 2027 guide [GUIDE]

What to do and what to see

You can explore Ugento on foot in half a day, but it deserves more: the museum and the castle in the old town, the churches, the Messapian walls, the frescoed crypt just outside the town and, a few minutes away, the park and the sea. Here are the experiences not to miss.

1. The New Archaeological Museum and the Zeus (1-2 hours)

The museum is housed in the old fifteenth-century Franciscan convent of Santa Maria della Pietà, on Largo Sant’Antonio, in the old town. Founded in 1968 as a civic museum, it reopened in 2009, after a long restoration, as the New Archaeological Museum. On the ground floor you will find the faithful copy of the Zeus of Ugento, made by the Turkish artist Murat Cura, and the Athlete’s Tomb, discovered in 1970 in via Salentina: a painted Messapian tomb from the late sixth to early fifth century BC, with rich grave goods of Greek vases and bronzes, including the strigils and the little jars for the scented oils used by athletes. On the first floor are the rooms devoted to the necropolises, the walls and the Messapian cults, the finds from the ancient port of Torre San Giovanni and the coins of the Ugento mint. Don’t miss the «cappelle murate» (walled-up chapels) of the convent church, with sixteenth-century frescoes rediscovered during the restoration: in one, below the Madonna del Latte, there is a painted fleet of galleys that recalls the Battle of Lepanto of 1571. In the refectory there is a large eighteenth-century Last Supper and, in room 3, an installation for a virtual tour of the Cripta del Crocefisso. Not far away, on via Messapica, in the stables of Palazzo Colosso, you can also visit, by booking, the Collezione Colosso, a nineteenth-century collection of 794 finds discovered in Ugento and the surrounding area.

2. The castle of the d’Amore marquises (1 hour, by booking)

The castle of Ugento stands on the highest point of the town. It began as a fortress in the Norman period, at the end of the eleventh century, on top of older remains; in the fifteenth century the Del Balzo strengthened it with large round towers, perhaps to a design by the Florentine architect Giuliano da Maiano, and it was badly damaged by the Turkish attack of 1537. In 1643 it was bought by the d’Amore marquises, who turned it from a fortress into a rich Baroque residence: the atrium with its long balcony on arches, the grand staircase decorated with stucco and, on the piano nobile, the rooms frescoed at the end of the seventeenth century with scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, the Old Testament and the history of Rome. The common thread is a play on the family name: Venus and Cupid, the gods of love, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses; in the d’Amore coat of arms a pelican opens its breast to feed its three young. After the restoration that began in 2013, part of the castle has become a hotel and the old storerooms a cookery school, while another part can be visited through the town’s Sistema dei Beni Culturali (cultural heritage service), by booking only.

3. The cathedral, the Diocesan Museum and the churches of the centre (1 hour)

The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta was built at the beginning of the eighteenth century in place of the Gothic church destroyed in 1537, and consecrated in 1745; the neoclassical façade, with a portico of four Ionic columns, dates from 1855. Inside, with a single nave and a Latin-cross plan, are the high altar and the balustrade in polychrome marble from 1740, a choir in olive wood, the altar of San Vincenzo, the town’s patron saint, and a canvas by Paolo Finoglio showing Sant’Andrea. In the underground rooms, used for burials in the seventeenth century, is the Diocesan Museum, with silver chalices, parchment missals, papier-mâché statues and the portraits of the bishops: check on the spot when it is open. A few steps away are the church of Sant’Antonio, next to the museum, with nine altars and canvases by the painter Saverio Lillo, the sanctuary of the Santi Medici, of Byzantine origin, remodelled in Baroque style and enlarged at the end of the nineteenth century, and the former church of Santa Filomena, belonging to the Benedictine nuns’ convent, now a hall for exhibitions and conferences. On the edge of the town, the sanctuary of the Madonna della Luce, rebuilt in 1576, recalls the miracle of a blind priest who, in 1563, on a pilgrimage to Leuca, regained his sight here.

4. The Messapian walls (1 hour)

Around the middle of the fourth century BC, at the time of the wars with Taranto, Ugento enclosed itself within a ring of walls about 4,900 metres long, surrounding 145 hectares: this made it the largest city in Messapia. The walls were up to almost 8 metres thick, with two faces of large squared blocks laid dry and a fill of stones and earth; they had at least eleven gates and were protected by a ditch. After the Roman conquest they were used for centuries as a stone quarry, but about half of their course survives, largely buried. The stretches still visible are in via Tasso, where the 2016-2018 excavations uncovered 70 metres of them, in via Mura Ugentine, via San Francesco and via Bolzano, in the Sant’Antonio area, next to a necropolis with some thirty tombs, and in the Porchiano area, on the road to Taurisano, where the finest stretch survives, up to 2.5 metres high. Some large blocks are also displayed on the first floor of the museum. Check on the spot which stretches are accessible: some are in the countryside, among vineyards and dry-stone walls.

5. The Cripta del Crocefisso and the Madonna di Costantinopoli (1 hour, by booking)

Just over a kilometre north of the old town, along the provincial road to Casarano, a steep flight of steps leads down into the Cripta del Crocefisso, or del Crocifisso: a small church carved into the rock of a quarry already worked by the Messapians, in an ancient rock-cut village. The walls are covered in frescoes from two periods, the thirteenth-fourteenth century, still Byzantine in taste, and the seventeenth century: the Annunciation, St Nicholas, Christ Pantocrator, the Virgin of Tenderness and the Crucifixion above the altar, which gave the crypt its name. The surprise is the thirteenth-century ceiling: red and black shields with crosses, stars and fantastic animals, such as a griffin, a hydra and a sphinx, which some scholars link to the Templars or the Teutonic Knights, although it is more likely that the crypt was the funerary chapel of a wealthy local family. Next to it is the little seventeenth-century church of the Madonna di Costantinopoli, incorporated into a masseria and frescoed throughout, with the Madonna enthroned dated 1619. Visits are by booking.

6. Gemini and its menhirs (1 hour)

4 km from Ugento, on the road to Torre Mozza, is Gemini, «Scèmmine» in dialect, perhaps already inhabited in Roman times: the name probably comes from the cult of the twins Castor and Pollux. When Ugento was destroyed in 1537, part of the population took refuge here. In the small village you can see Palazzo Macrì, Palazzo Piccinno and Palazzo Riso, from the sixteenth century, the eighteenth-century mother church of San Francesco d’Assisi and two menhirs, the ancient stone monoliths driven into the ground: the Menhir della Visitazione and the «Christianised» one in Largo Croce. On 4 October there is the fair of San Francesco.

7. The Litorale di Ugento Regional Nature Park (half a day)

Between Torre San Giovanni and Lido Marini, along about 8 km of coast and up to 3 km inland, stretches the Litorale di Ugento Regional Nature Park, established in 2007: about 1,600 hectares of dunes, pine woods, brackish basins linked to the sea by canals and, further inland, a fossil cliff cut by ravines and the largest area of Mediterranean scrub in Salento. The basins were created by the land reclamation of the 1920s and 1930s, which freed Ugento from malaria, and today they are a stopover for grey herons, little egrets, coots and other waterbirds. You can explore it on foot along the shore, with binoculars at the basins or with the park’s official guides. You will find all the details in our guide to Torre Mozza.