Orfanotrofio "Ciullo" in Castro agli inizi del Novecento

Going back to the history of the "Ciullo" institute, in a country that at the end of the nineteenth century still lived on the margins, has a value of particular thickness and interest. Its realization was the spring, which has transformed a place and community with a gallery of characters, institutes and common people, who have marked the life of the resort in good and evil. It was the years when Castro's discovery by poets such as Perotti, painters with Stasi and Casciaro, of scientists like Breuil and Blanc, fused with the indomitable passion of don Gabriele Ciullo, the true protagonist of that historical phase, Where a small country, burdened with memories and misfortunes, drew the flight to modernity. Knowing the company's difficulties, he understood that the way of communication was indispensable vehicle for his project by creating an information body "Bulletin of the Santuario della Madonna di Pompei in Castro", on which the story of his initiative and the promotion of In a short time a Marian cult, which did not have the same not only in Salento. Gabriele Ciullo has surprisingly interpreted the hopes of this land, in a work of welcome and mercy, challenging adversity and distrust, to be told in detail, without ever denying its goal: to create a reception port for the girls Disenchanted and provide an instrument of providence of the Eternal. Reverting the vicissitudes, which have accompanied the realization of the pious work, means penetrating a little-known and submerged history of a community transited from the Middle Ages to the gates of modernity.