[…]There is only light. The light that dominates Otranto like an alchemist dominates its elements. […]
This is how Roberto Cotroneo describes Otranto in the book dedicated to the city. Otranto is truly an alchemy, the place where opposites coincide, where East and West take up the race with history.
To the city on the surface, dazzling with sun and teeming with colors, happens at night when the winds creep into the cracks.
Coming to Otranto means experiencing emotions in layers, from the deepest one that has its roots in history, to the lighter, superficial and colorful aspect.
The Marimar Apartments residence is the synthesis of these souls. Comfortable and a stone’s throw from the sea, it offers a unique opportunity to its guests: the opportunity to visit the underground system “Grotte San Giovanni” which is the exclusive property of Marimar Apartments, which guarantees its protection.
The structure of the Hypogeum
The hypogeum, dating back to the early Christian age, occupies the limestone base that houses the pine forest, a green oasis of the residential complex.
Recently restored and placed in safety, the hypogeum was excavated in the early centuries of Christianity and used by a Jewish community.
The central room leads to a circular dependence, which ends in a quadrangular hall, and to a long dròmos, dotted with numerous small rectangular and semicircular rooms, equipped with cells and closed by stone parapets up to a height of about one meter.
Inside the hypogeum it is possible to admire graffiti of Christian iconography dating back to different eras, such as the chrismon, Greek and Latin starry crosses and numerous names of people written in Greek, most of which are now illegible, from which they can be distinguished in a only a few letters sharper.
How the Hypogeum was used
The original destination of the entire complex was supposed to be, presumably, that of warehouse of the late Roman period for goods arriving in the nearby port, waiting to set out on the final stretch of the Via Traiana-Calabra.
Probably reused by the Byzantines in the Golden Otranto period, it was later transformed into an oil mill around the 1600s before being definitively abandoned.
Inside there are still traces of three Calabrian presses while there are no signs of the millstone, although it is assumed that the grinding took place in vain and that the dròmos was the connection with the area of the presses, given that the dròmos tanks were used for host the freshly ground material to be conveyed after squeezing.
The collapse of the Hypogeum
At a stratigraphic level, the loop area is more on the surface than the upper plateau, and it is believed that this caused the collapse of the hypogeum, due to the weight of the carts loaded with olives that arrived on the plateau.
Visit the Hypogeum
The complex underground system extends on the opposite side of the road with other cells and corridors and can always be visited by our guests.
