Fra Messapi e Sallentini... c'è di mezzo il mare

The purpose of this paper is to pay homage to Cosimo Pagliara by highlighting his 'prophetic' intuition regarding the importance of the sites and, in particular, the coastal sanctuaries of the lower Salento. An attempt will be made to focus on how the garrisoning of the salient areas of the coastline may have represented not only a flywheel of development, but also a historical factor that acted on the creation of an identity profile of the populations of this territory. An analytical excursus on the basis of documentary elements of various kinds will make it possible to observe, in a historical phase that coincides with the intensification of traffic in the Otranto Channel and indeed with the new configuration of this geographical space, phenomena that accompany the political-identitary and territorial definition of the communities known as Sallentini in the key of ethnicity, whose criteria insist on a coastal/marine dimension that distinguishes them from the so-called "Messapic" world.