Tratto della cinta messapica

On the far side of a vineyard near the Porchiano locality, blocks of squared limestone still stand in two faces where Ugento's Messapic wall once ran its full circuit. At 4,900 metres around and 145 hectares enclosed, this was the largest urban perimeter in Messapia — and Porchiano keeps its best-preserved stretch.

Why it matters

City walls are statements, and Ugento's made the loudest statement in Messapia. Built, the municipality judges, in the second half of the fourth century BC, the circuit ran 4,900 metres and wrapped about 145 hectares, making Ugento the largest centre of Messapia, with an estimated population of at least ten thousand inhabitants that minted its own coinage. What survives at Porchiano is the best-preserved sector of that ring, and it is eloquent precisely because it is engineering rather than reconstruction: a double facing of great squared limestone blocks laid dry, with a core of stones and earth, exactly as Messapian masons set them in the fourth century BC.

What to notice

The outer facing survives here to a maximum height of about 2.50 metres, capped by a modern stone wall that protects the ancient courses; the inner side is embanked against the wall. The blocks run up to 2.15 metres long, 65 to 70 centimetres high and 70 wide, laid in alternating header-and-stretcher courses without mortar, and the reconstructed width of the wall at this point is around six metres — dimensions that convey how heavy the original structure was, with sources crediting it at six to eight metres of thickness and a crown of towers.Elsewhere in the municipal territory, the Sant'Antonio necropolis preserves another exposed segment, some eighteen metres long in a zigzag layout, a reminder that the circuit can be met at more than one point.

Context and history

The walls belong to the great age of Messapian urbanism. Around the turn of the first millennium BC the Messapi settled this plateau, and by the classical period Ugento had grown into one of their principal cities; the second half of the fourth century BC brought the monumental perimeter whose line the modern town still loosely follows. The scale paid off in status — the municipality describes Ugento at that point as the largest centre of Messapia, a term for the peninsula's southern half — but the wall also frames the later story: the city allied with Hannibal, whose army landed and provisioned through the port of Ugento, paid for it after Rome's victory, and became a Roman municipality in 82 BC. The section at Porchiano remains part of the landscape through which the ancient circuit ran.