Monumento agli Eroi e Martiri

On the Lungomare degli Eroi, Otranto raised itself in bronze: a female allegory of the city, cloaked in heraldry and turning defiantly toward the sea from which the Ottoman fleet came in 1480 — the civic twin of the martyrs' shrine in the cathedral.

Why it matters

Otranto's Monumento agli Eroi e Martiri commemorates the city's resistance during the Turkish siege of 1480. The work is by Antonio Bortone, a sculptor born in Ruffano in 1844 who died in Lecce in 1938 after a career that took him from Lecce's Academy of Fine Arts to Florence and to a bas-relief inside Rome's Vittoriano. His sculptural project for Otranto dates to 1907, and the finished bronze is dated 1922–1923.

What to notice

The figure is an allegory, and every element is programmed. The city of Otranto is personified as a heroine who turns proudly toward the sea — the direction from which the invaders arrived — rather than toward the safety of the interior. She wears a wide cloak bearing the coat of arms of the province of Lecce, and a headdress carrying the city's own emblem, so that she reads simultaneously as Otranto, as Salento and as the idea of civic courage. Bortone's training shows in the modelling: the bronze follows a late-nineteenth-century tradition of public sculpture, rhetorical but disciplined, meant to be read from across the seafront promenade.

The monument stands on the seafront of the Lungomare degli Eroi. Its figure faces the sea from which the Ottoman fleet approached in 1480.

Context and history

On 28 July 1480 an Ottoman fleet appeared off the Otranto channel, opening the episode of resistance this monument commemorates. Fifteen days later the city fell; the cathedral became a mosque; and on 14 August the executions of the roughly eight hundred men who refused to abandon their faith began, with Antonio Pezzulla — known as Primaldo — first to die. Their remains were gathered the following year and now rest in the cathedral; Pope Francis canonized them on 12 May 2013.

Antonio Bortone's sculptural project dates to 1907; the bronze was executed between 1922 and 1923. The monument's two phases place it in distinct periods of Italian public art.