The Messapian city wall

The Messapian city walls

The city walls of Ugento date back to the period of maximum expansion of the Messapian centre, around the middle of the 4th century BC. Their construction took place in a historical moment of great instability and conflict between the Messapian and Tarentini, even if at first the walls mainly responded to the desire of the urban aristocracy to define the urban perimeter and mark the distinction with the surrounding countryside; later, the military events that characterise in particular the 3rd century BC, with the expansion of Rome which also affected Messapia, accentuated the defensive function of the city walls. Therefore, after its construction, at least in some parts, it was further fortified between the second half of the 4th and the 3rd century BC; the walls then played an important role in the defence of the city during the Second Punic War, when the Uzentini, as recalled by Tito Livio (XXII, 61, 11-12), joined Hannibal against Rome. After the Roman conquest, starting from the 2nd century BC they were gradually demolished and turned into a quarry for building material.
The city walls enclosed the hill on which Ugento extends and part of the flat areas on its north-eastern, south-eastern and south-western slopes, delimiting a total area of 145 hectares, making it the largest of the Messapian cities (fig. 1). However, the big area enclosed by the walls, was not completely built up, but, according to a settlement model already established in the archaic period throughout Messapia, included settlements, sacred areas, sectors for productive activities and areas without buildings, used as gardens or occupied by animal enclosures, water deposits, some of which exploited natural depressions, and also funerary areas, organised mainly in the most peripheral areas, often near the roads that crossed the walls, both inside and outside them.
Of this imposing wall circuit, about 4,900 metres long, about half of the perimeter is still preserved today, especially in the northern, eastern and south-western sectors of the route, in areas that were not reached or only partially touched by the intense urban expansion that affected Ugento from the middle of the 20th century. The city walls have been the subject of various studies since the 1970s based mainly on the analysis of the preserved sections, on the study of historical aerial photographs to identify of sections destroyed in the first half of the twentieth century and on geophysical prospection to document sections buried or obliterated by urbanisation. In order to define the route and the location of the doors that opened there, the study of historical cartography is also very important, consisting of the perspective view published in 1703 by Giovan Battista Pacichelli and, above all, the plans drawn in 1810 by architect Angelo Palazzi (fig. 2) and in 1889 and 1897 by the engineer Giuseppe Epstein, who documented the entire route, highlighting the numerous remains that still exist and the sections that were only hypothetical at the time. However, the sections of the wall that have been the subject of the archaeological excavations have been very limited (in terms of the number and extension of the sectors investigated), mostly consisting of occasional interventions carried out in emergency situations or prior to private building or public infrastructure works; only recently a research project has been lunched aimed at the systematic study, through more or less extensive excavations, of the construction characteristics of the city walls, their construction phases and the procurement strategies of the stone materials used for their construction, as well as at the valorisation of the sections still preserved in the Messapian Walls Park of Ugento.
Only in some places and for short segments the Messapian walls are still visible, incorporated in the later stone walls or brought to light by archaeological excavations: in the area of Porchiano (fig. 3) and Sant'Antonio, respectively on the northern and north-eastern parts of the route (fig. 1, A-B, along via Mura Ugentine, San Francesco (fig. 4) and Bolzano, all in the south-western sector of the circuit (fig. 1, C-E), and along via Tasso (fig. 5), in its north-western part (fig. 1, F).
The rest is mostly underground, incorporated into boundary walls, covered by piles of stone or obliterated by roads and modern buildings that use the remains of the walls as foundations. However, many sections were already destroyed in the 19th and early 20th centuries and then, especially after the Second World War, until the protective measures already provided for in the General Regulatory Plan of the Municipality of Ugento approved in 1982, further strengthened in 2005 with an urban planning constraint of unbuildability to protect the preserved wall stretches, adopted by the City Council and then included in the Regional Territorial Landscape Plan of Puglia; for these reasons, as already mentioned, in the course of the studies the plans of Ugento drawn during the nineteenth century and the aerial photographs taken between the 1940s and 1960s, before the strong urban expansion of the modern town , proved particularly useful.
The walls generally consisted of a structure with two curtain walls in opus quadratum, made od large parallelepiped blocks of calcarenite (some examples are exhibited in room 5 on the first floor of the Museum), containing a filling of stones and earth (emplekton); along the route the thickness ascertained by the excavations varies from 6.50 to 7.80 m. An exception is a segment of about 17.50 metres long discovered in 1986-1987 by the Archaeological Superintendency at the above-mentioned locality of Sant'Antonio, which was instead built as a full structure, with blocks throughout the thickness, which reaches up to 6 m. The doors that opened there, at least in some cases protected by square towers and bayonet sections, must have been at least 11, corresponding to as many roads that crossed them.
In the 70 m stretch excavated in 2016-2018 by the Archaeological Superintendency in via Tasso it was possible, for the first time, to identify, two construction phases. The first, referring to the mid-4th century BC, consists of two rows of blocks arranged lengthwise to contain the emplekton, while the second is instead made up of an external lining of blocks placed very carefully in rows alternately arranged head-on and lengthwise, which was added to reinforced the pre-existing structure, perhaps in the second half of the 4th or early 3rd century BC (fig. 6). Very recent excavations(2024), still in progress, carried out by the Institute of Cultural Heritage Sciences of the CNR in collaboration with the Municipality of Ugento, between via San Francesco and via Bolzano, have instead made it possible to investigate the fortification methods of an angular section , where it was highlighted that the outer curtain was reinforced by a sort of bastion also characterised in this case by two construction phases.
The wall circuit was also further strengthened by the presence of an external moat, shallow and almost 3 m wide, a section of which was excavated in 2021 by the Archaeological Superintendency in the Santisorgi-Aia area (fig. 7). This ditch, in addition to hindering the approach of siege engines to the fortifications, was also used for the extraction of blocks intended for the walls themselves. Most of these blocks were instead quarried in the quarries located immediately to the north of the Messapian city, in the areas of Sant'Antonio, Crocefisso and Cupelle, where large ancient fronts are still visible with traces of the quarrying of large blocks of calcarenite.