Monteruga

Monteruga is an abandoned frazione of Veglie, in the province of Lecce. The village grew out of the farm of the same name. The name refers to a hill cut by a ditch.

Built during the Fascist period (1928), it is a typical rural village of that time. It is laid out around a square, with the rural church on one of the short sides between two wings of porticoes.

In the 1950s Monteruga was assigned to SEBI (Società Elettrica per Bonifiche e Irrigazioni), which took over more than a thousand hectares of land and employed many workers, mostly from southern Salento.

Between the 1970s and 1980s it reached 800 inhabitants, most of them working in agriculture and in producing tobacco, oil and wine.

Monteruga's life as a village ended with the privatisation of the farm in the 1980s and the division of the land. In the 2000s the businessman Maurizio Zamparini wanted to turn it into a tourist resort, but the project never started.

What remains of this recent past: the housing, the rural school, the central square, the church of Saint Anthony the Abbot (celebrated every year on 17 January with a big procession through the village), the tobacco warehouse, the barracks, the bowls court, the workers' club ("lu Ralla", still recognisable by a lunette painted on the façade) and the winery, whose walls still carry a slogan meant to encourage the workers: "Those who drink wine live longer than the doctor who forbids it".

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian