Gallipoli’s old town stands on a limestone island off the western coast of the Salento peninsula. Its protected harbor and position on Ionian sea routes attracted settlement and trade long before the surviving Baroque streets were built. Ancient origins are uncertain: traditions connect the town with Greek heroes, while archaeology and historical scholarship point to Messapian settlement influenced by Greek culture. The name was understood through Greek as “beautiful city,” though legends should not be treated as a secure founding record.

Rome incorporated the region during its conquest of southern Italy. The harbor supported fishing, agriculture, and coastal exchange. After the western empire’s collapse, Gallipoli experienced Byzantine rule and attacks or occupations associated with Lombards, Arabs, and other powers contesting the Mediterranean. Norman conquest in the eleventh century brought the town into the kingdoms that ruled southern Italy, while its castle and walls developed under Angevin and Aragonese authorities.

The island form made Gallipoli defensible but also exposed it to siege. A bridge linked it permanently to the mainland in the early modern period, and bastions were adapted for artillery. In 1484 Venetian forces captured and sacked the town during war with the Kingdom of Naples. Spanish Habsburg rule followed, and Ottoman threats encouraged further fortification. Military works guarded not only residents but a valuable commercial harbor.

From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Gallipoli became a major center for lamp oil. Olive oil produced across Salento was stored and clarified in underground presses and cisterns beneath the old town, then exported to cities across Europe for lighting and industrial uses. Merchants, porters, sailors, coopers, landowners, and laborers sustained the trade. Wealth financed palaces and richly decorated confraternity churches, including the cathedral dedicated to Saint Agatha, while harsh labor and unequal landholding underpinned prosperity.

The end of feudal arrangements, French Napoleonic rule, Bourbon restoration, and Italian unification changed administration and commerce. New technologies reduced demand for lamp oil, while railways and urban growth expanded Gallipoli onto the mainland. Fishing and port activity continued, and the island remained a dense residential and religious quarter rather than becoming an abandoned monument.

Twentieth-century restoration and tourism emphasized the castle, walls, churches, sea views, and winding lanes. Yet preservation must also address salt, storms, traffic, seasonal crowding, and conversion of homes into visitor accommodation. Gallipoli’s old town records a long contest over a strategic harbor and the rise and fall of an export economy. Its Baroque beauty is inseparable from underground oil works, maritime labor, warfare, religious associations, and the continuous adaptation of an island community to changing Mediterranean networks.

The underground presses are especially important because they reveal an industrial city beneath the ceremonial one. Workers and animals operated in confined spaces where stable temperatures aided oil processing; storage pits and channels organized a commodity later consumed far away. Many installations were closed, filled, or converted when the trade declined. Their recovery changes how the churches and merchant palaces above are understood. Gallipoli’s historic landscape is vertical as well as horizontal, joining seabed and harbor, street and fortification, domestic rooms, sacred interiors, and subterranean workplaces.