Cesare Gallone.

Cesare Gallone (1586–1624) belongs to the cadet branch of the feudatory family of Tricase. Deeply devout to the Virgin, he links his name to two legacies of great significance for the community of Tricase: the church of San Michele Arcangelo, of which he is the commissioner — as attested by the epigraph on the entrance portal — and the stone statue of the Madonna and Child, today visible on the cornice of the mother church, above Piazza Pisanelli.

Of the statue makes memory father Luigi Tasselli da Casarano (1622–1694), Capuchin, in his Le Antichità di Leuca, published in Lecce in 1693. On page 15 one reads how the "Signor Cesare Galloni, most devout of the great Mother of God" had the image of the Virgin sculpted, in relief, before the parish church of Tricase, on high — an image that some said to be of Santa Maria del Foggiaro, others of Santa Maria di Leuca.

The statue, sculpted for the second matrix of Tricase, was preserved and placed, at the end of the 18th century, on the third matrix church — the present one — where it still today protects from on high the square and the people of Tricase who gather there.

On this legacy also intervenes the scholar Michele Paone in the essay La chiesa nuova, collected in Tricase. Studi e documenti (Congedo Editore, Galatina 1978, pp. 135–136): the Virgin was the celestial patroness and the maternal guardian of Tricase, and "of the Mother of God Cesare Gallone had had the statue sculpted", recognisable in the stone figure which, hoisted on a cornice of the new matrix, holds under its gaze the little square of the town.

Alongside the patronage of the Virgin of the cornice, Cesare Gallone is the commissioner of the church of San Michele Arcangelo of Tricase, erected in the early 17th century. The epigraph on the entrance portal preserves its memory, sealing the bond between the cadet branch of the Gallone and the sacred patrimony of the community.

Cesare Gallone is a contemporary of the first Gallone feudatories of Tricase: Giovanni Angelo II (1572–1616), 3rd Baron, and Alessandro II (1598–1623), 4th Baron. He belongs in all probability to a cadet or collateral branch of the house and does not figure in the direct line of succession of the Barons and then Princes of Tricase: the first Principality would be granted to Stefano II Gallone only in 1651, twenty-seven years after the death of Cesare.

Record to be expanded. The precise genealogical link of Cesare with the baronial and princely line of the Gallone remains to be clarified from the family's personal sources: the mother, the possible spouse and the direct descent are not to date documented in the Gallone archive consulted.