Brindisi's name means stag's head, after the shape of its harbour
The southern Italian port of Brindisi takes its name from a Messapian word for a stag's head, likely because its natural harbour branches like antlers. That harbour made it Rome's gateway to Greece and the East, the place where Virgil died, a Crusader departure point, and briefly, in 1943, Italy's seat of government.
The city sits in Apulia on the Adriatic, where the harbour cuts deep into the coast. Its Latin name Brundisium came via Greek from the Messapian Brention. Legends credit its founding to the hero Diomedes, while the geographer Strabo said settlers came from Knossos in Crete. Archaeology finds a Bronze Age village of the 16th century BC on a peninsula in the outer harbour, with fragments of Mycenaean pottery.
Rome took the city in 267 BC, and after the Punic Wars it became a hub of Roman naval power and trade, linked to the capital by the Via Appia and the Via Traiana. With perhaps 100,000 inhabitants, it was the main embarkation point for Greece. Caesar besieged it in 49 BC, and in 40 BC Octavian, Lepidus and Mark Antony sealed the Treaty of Brundisium there. The poet Pacuvius was born in the city and Virgil died there in 19 BC. Two tall Roman columns stood by the water; one survives, and the ruins of the other went to neighbouring Lecce.
Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards followed, the last destroying it in 674, though the harbour guaranteed revival. Under the Normans from 1070 it flourished as a port for the Holy Land. Emperor Frederick II married Isabella II of Jerusalem in its cathedral in 1225, sailed from it on crusade in 1227, and built the Swabian Castle to guard the inner harbour. Plague struck in 1348 and an earthquake in 1456.
After Italy's 1943 armistice, King Victor Emmanuel III and Pietro Badoglio made Brindisi the provisional capital until February 1944. It remains a major port for trade with the Balkans, Greece and the Middle East, and home to the San Marco marine regiment. Summers are hot and dry, and the Scirocco occasionally drops red Saharan sand.
Source: Brindisi
