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| Inhabitants' name: Minervinesi |
The civic
coat of arms of Minervino of Lecce has the Goddess Minerva on a blue background.
She
 has
a white dress, a quill in the right hand, a spear and a shield in the left hand.
In the countryside of Minervino there is a dolmen called ‘scusi’. It probably
was an altar where people used to sacrifice to the Gods. We have not got any
historic documents on the origins of this village, but we have three hypothesis:
the name of the village could derive from the name of the Goddess Minerva so we
can suppose there was a temple probably in the Japigian period. Some scholars
think that the village was founded in the Roman period because people found a
street with the same paving of the Via Appia which goes from Brindisi to Rome,
other scholars think that the village was founded in the 9th- 10th
century by those who survived the destruction of Castro, in this case the
village would come from ‘Castrum Minervae’, the old name of Castro. The first
historic documents about Minervino date to 1269 when the village belonged to
Ruggiero Sambiase. It was then ruled by Giordano De Paleano , Ugone Billotta,
the Pratos, the De Frisis, Ruggero Maremonte, the Morì Della Gattas, the Ursos,
the Filomarinis and the Venturis. In this period Minervino was a very important
town and was considered as a province on its own. Among the famous people of
Minervino we remember : Giulio De Giuseppe, Francesco Saverio Nicolazzi, Oronzo
Cosi and Bernardo Roberto.
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