In the 11th century the Normans, a people of North European, Scandinavian and Danish origin, conquered Longobard and Byzantine Apulia and than Calabria and Moorish Sicily. They founded a Kingdom with great political and artistic influence which was to last for 800 years. In 1065 Ruggero Guarini, a Norman knight, followed Boemondo Hauteville as counsellor and companion-in-arms in the adventure of the First Crusade. Today the Guarini family continue to possess and cultivate in Salento estates and farms of about 700 hectares. The wines, the varieties of oil, the cheese and the preserves are the fruit of their work and an almost thousand- year-old attachment to the region. The centre of their enterprise is in Scorrano, where there are the wine cellar and the oil mill, built in the 19th and 15th centuries.

Scorrano is a small pleasant town in the heart of the Salento peninsula, 30 Kilometres from Lecce which is, a fascinating artistic town famous for its spectacular baroque architecture. Scorrano was founded by the Roman centurion Marcus Emilius Scaurus and was an important bulwark against the advance of the Ottomans, who in 1480 had conquered Otranto.