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VALERİO, Sebastiano
Otranto 1480: From History to the Epic
In the 1480, forces of the Ottoman Empire invaded Otranto, in Apulia, in the Kingdom of Naples, and, after capture,
more than 800 of its inhabitants were executed. This paper wants to present a panoramic view of Italian literature
about Otranto 1480, from the contemporaries who wrote about it to the modern literature inspired to this episode. Many
poets spoke about Otranto, from Pietro Jacopo De Jennaro to Benedetto Cariteo and Jacopo Sannazaro, while, in modern
age, the war of Otranto was object of the novel L’ora di tutti (1962) by Maria Corti, Nostra signora dei Turchi (1966, became a
movie, presented at Venetia International Film Festival in 1968) by Carmelo Bene and Otranto (1997) e I demoni di Otranto
(2012) by Roberto Cotroneo. A war episode, who Machiavelli i.e. considered simply as a part of politic relationships between
Turkish Empire and Italian states, became a religion war at the middle XVI cent., when this historical event was interpreted
as a conflict between religions.
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