Sea and castles Beautiful Otranto

Otranto is located in the Southeast of Italy, Apulia region, named also as “The heel of the boot”. Otranto is famous for the historical castles facings the sea, and also as horse breed in the longer past. It is located on the east coast of the Salento peninsula. The Strait of Otranto, to which the city gives its name, connects the Adriatic Sea with the Ionian Sea and separates Italy from Albania. Thousand year and more of history, The city occupies the site of the ancient Greek city of Magna Graecia Hydrus but originally it was a town of Messapian, and it was used in the wars of Pyrrhus and of Hannibal to fight against Rome. The castle of the town is Gothic style, It was built a few years after a terrible massacre in 1480. At that time Otranto was a flourishing city with more than 20.000 inhabitants, but they were invaded by an Ottoman fleet of 128 ships, and according to some historians 12.000 people were killed and 5.000 enslaved. Some 800 men who refused to convert to Islam were beheaded. You can still hear stories about the martyrs of Otranto and see their skulls in the cathedral and in Oria in commemoration of the young men who went to Otranto to fight the Turchs and never came back. So the true story of Otranto is even more Gothic than Horace Walpole imagined. And they have the execution stone and the giant cannon balls to prove it.