The foundation legend has a bull scraping the ground until water sprang up, on the spot where the monumental fountain in Piazza San Domenico now stands. The documented town is Messapian in origin and appears as Neritum . Under the Normans the Basilian abbey was enlarged and the ducal palace built; the cathedral rose on the ruins of that Basilian church, Sancta Maria de Nerito , and still holds frescoes of successive centuries — a San Nicola and a Christ enthroned blessing in the Greek manner from the fourteenth century, a Virgin and Child of 1511 , a fifteenth-century Sant'Agostino — together with the Cristo Nero , a wooden crucifix dark from the cedar it is carved in.

From 1497 Nardò was a fief of the Acquaviva , dukes of Nardò and lords of the adjoining castle. Under them it became something unusual for a southern town: for two centuries it genuinely held one of the most important concentrations of learning in the Kingdom, with academies and higher studies, and the title Nuova Atene litterarum was not merely flattery.

The same family showed the other face of seigneurial power in 1647 , when Masaniello's revolt reached these streets. The count of Conversano , an Acquaviva, put it down with a brutality that entered the record: coming with armed men to his own rebellious Nardò, he hanged the mayor and many citizens .

Then the earthquake. A contemporary chronicle describes the afternoon of Wednesday 20 February 1743 with terrible immediacy: a day more like summer than winter; toward sunset a violent wind that astonished and terrified everyone, as though hundreds of carriages were running through the air together, such was the noise; the air darkened and seemed to give off fire; the water leapt in the wells; the sun was obscured. Then the ground shook, shook again, and finally moved like water boiling in a pot , and Nardò fell from its foundations. Oil, grain, furniture and household goods were ruined under the stones, so that in the years afterward such things were worth more.

How many died is genuinely disputed. The contemporary account gives 349 citizens, most of them children ; modern accounts give 150 and 112 . The shock reached the ninth Mercalli degree, its epicentre apparently in the Channel of Otranto , and it did serious damage at Francavilla Fontana, at Maruggio, and as far as Amaxichi on the island of Lefkada in the Ionian Sea.

The town rebuilt in Baroque. San Domenico , raised in the last twenty years of the 1500s by Giovanni Maria Tarantino and Gio Tommaso Riccio for the Dominicans and first dedicated to Santa Maria de Raccomandatis, was almost entirely destroyed and rebuilt to Counter-Reformation requirements, its carparo facade carrying garlands and putti. And in Piazza Salandra the citizens raised, at their own insistence , the Guglia dell'Immacolata : inaugurated in 1769 , nineteen metres of carparo on an octagonal pyramidal plan in five rising sections, with San Giuseppe, Sant'Anna, San Gioacchino and San Giovanni Battista at the base and the Immacolata at the summit.

In 1806 , with the abolition of feudalism throughout the Kingdom, Acquaviva power ended. After unification the citizens pressed for and obtained a municipal theatre, as other Italian towns were doing.