UGENTO, DIOCESE of. — City and diocese in the province of Lecce. It has an area of 350 sq km and a population of 87,000 inhabitants, all Catholics, distributed among 33 parishes, served by 72 diocesan priests and 13 religious priests; it has one seminary, 4 male and 18 female religious communities (Ann. Pont. 1953, p. 438).
An ancient Messapian center at the extreme point of Salento, it preserves monuments of that primitive civilization; it felt Hellenic influence, but lost all importance under Roman rule because of the constant ascendancy of Otranto and Taranto. It shared the fate of these cities when the successive dominations of the Lombards, the Byzantines, and then the Normans prevailed, interspersed with Muslim invasions that recurred even in the sixteenth century. As for its Christian origins, no details are known; the Latin element, predominant at first, was followed in the eighth century by a period of Byzantine predominance, with numerous Greek monasteries that later, under Norman rule, gradually disappeared. As a diocese, it is first mentioned in a bull of Innocent III dated 23 June 1198 as a suffragan of Otranto, together with Leuca and Lecce; but the list of its bishops begins only with a Lando in 1254. The origins of the bishopric of Leuca are likewise unknown. The anonymous bishop of Leuca whom Liutprand of Cremona mentions so unfavorably in 968 probably belonged to Byzantine Leucas (S. Maura), certainly not to Leuca (PL 136, 935 ff.). In the fourteenth century, at the latest, the local bishop moved to live in Alessano, in the interior of the peninsula, perhaps for greater security, and the first bishop securely attested as episcopatus Leucadiensis et Alexanensis is the Dominican Riccardo, elected on 6 September 1333; the succession ended in November 1804, and after a long vacancy the diocese was united with that of U. in 1818, following the Bourbon Concordat with the Holy See. U. continued always to be a suffragan of Otranto; the see remained vacant from 1863 to 1873.
MONUMENTS. — Ancient flourishing Uxentum, which had its own mint and army, preserves from the past only a few ruins of megalithic walls. The Cathedral is dedicated to s. Vincenzo, deacon of Saragossa, patron of the diocese. An interesting building is the fourteenth-century church of Madonna del Casale, outside the inhabited area, a surviving part of an ancient monastic complex now destroyed. The few monuments scattered throughout the diocese are of little importance. At Leuca, near the promontory (the Roman Japygium promontorium), upon which stands the Corinthian column commissioned by Filiberto d'Aragona (1694) as a memorial to the supposed landing and preaching of s. Pietro, rises the most venerated sanctuary of S. Maria, or « De finibus terrae », a Baroque reconstruction (1720) of an older building erected on a temple of Minerva, whose altar is still preserved inside. Taurisano retains a small fourteenth-century church dedicated to s. Maria della Strada, with a cusp-topped baldachin, rose window, and hanging arches. Presicce, besides the Baroque parish church (1778–81), possesses the church of the Angeli, the work of the fellow townsman F. Cito (1596), with a large wooden Crucifix by fra' Pasquale da S. Cesario, and the adjoining convent of the Riformati. At Tricase, the spacious mother church (1770), with its rich Baroque choir, and the church of the Dominicans, likewise Baroque, with two eighteenth-century canvases, stand out.
Of great interest, on the other hand, are the surviving Basilian eremitical crypts, numerous throughout Salento. The most important to mention is the so-called crypt of the Crocifisso near U., trapezoidal and supported by columns, with fourteenth-century frescoes still well preserved: the Annunciation, two Madonnas with Child, s. Nicola, and a fine Blessing Christ whose figurative foreshortenings strongly recall Sicilian and Venetian examples. Other smaller laurae are found near Castrignano and Ruffano (the Carmine crypt, with fifteenth-century frescoes).