Area Archeologica di Roca Vecchia e Grotta della Poesia

On a low Adriatic promontory between Lecce and Otranto, Roca Vecchia stacks five millennia of settlement around two sea caves whose walls carry hundreds of Messapic, Greek and Latin inscriptions. The Grotta della Poesia, a collapsed karst pool of startling blue, is the famous face of a site whose real depth lies in its Bronze Age quarter.

Why it matters

Few places on the Italian coast pack this much history into so small a triangle of land. Excavations run by the Università del Salento since the 1980s have shown that the promontory was fortified and settled from the late seventeenth century BC, with pottery and customs pointing firmly across the Aegean. The inner quarter yielded a vast ritual building of the Final Bronze Age, over forty metres long, where animal sacrifice and communal feasting left an archaeological layer unlike anything else in the region, together with more than two thousand fragments of Aegean-type pottery. Cult activity here continued into the early second century BC, spanning the whole span from prehistory to the Messapian era. Add the medieval refoundation of the town and a Messapic wall circuit of roughly 1,400 metres, and Roca becomes the single most substantial archaeological park on the Salento coast.

What to notice

The Area Castello and the Area Grotte preserve two connected parts of Roca Vecchia's history. The Bronze Age enceinte included a monumental gateway with a passage over twenty metres deep, at least five postern exits and rock-cut ditches, all cut in local calcarenite. A skeleton found in the gate in 2017 bears evidence of the siege and fire that ended the Middle Bronze Age town. The footprint of the capanna-tempio, the immense ritual hall of that period, is visible in the excavated quarter. In the Area Grotte, the larger cave opens to the sea as a natural limestone pool, while the smaller Poesia Piccola holds hundreds of incisions and inscriptions carved between the Messapian period and Roman times. The medieval phase survives on the headland as wall lines, a castle platform and the sites of two churches, one Latin and one Greek in rite.

Context and history

Roca's story runs in three great movements. The prehistoric town grew into one of the fortified centres of the Adriatic Bronze Age, maintaining contacts with the Mycenaean world until siege and destruction struck in the fourteenth century BC. The Messapian community later reused the promontory, repairing fortifications, burying its dead in tombs east of the walls — a 2008 excavation west and south of the caves uncovered twenty-two graves of the fourth and third centuries BC — and treating the twin caves as a sanctuary, their walls accumulating votive writings in Messapic, Greek and Latin. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD the count of Lecce, Gualtieri VI di Brienne, rebuilt a fortified town on the site, complete with market and the two-rite churches. Systematic excavation began only in the 1980s and 1990s, led by Cosimo Pagliara of the Università del Salento with the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and field campaigns continued into the 2010s.