Lecce and surrounds: past and present

Departure next day was fairly leisurely, we had about an hour and a half of travel and couldn’t check in till around 3 00 pm. First stop was Ceglie Messapica, yet another pretty hilltop town about half an hour down the road.

St Frances of Assisi gets a lot of recognition in this town, but we were there to see another very pretty town and to sample some of the local cookies. We needed an accompaniment for our due cappuccini on a cool and slightly rainy morning.

Quite a bit of work and restoration happening in the town, some of which looked very run down. I guess that’s the problem for the whole region, there is just so much of this aged infrastructure made of very enduring stonework, but restoring and upgrading it must cost multimillions of euros.

The Duke’s castello, which includes a Norman period tower, with a keep added to the top to extend it, was undergoing significant repair, but the rest of the establishment also required significant reinstatement.

The chiesa was in very good shape with a team setting up for a wedding or some sort of religious celebration.

On our way south to Lecce, we started to see more and more areas of dead and dying olive groves. They are apparently being killed by a virus carried and spread by sap-sucking insects. The disease is being managed but is slowly spreading north. There are some resistant olive varieties but the trees being killed are old to ancient and new plants will take a long time to be yield at the level these old trees do. Some of the old trees are being topped and then grafted with resistant varieties, but it will still be around four years before these even start to provide some yield.

        

The drive into Lecce wasn’t too difficult and we found our accommodation quite easily, just outside the old city wall. The apartment is quite spacious, and modern, but we found a few aspects a bit surprising, leading to a relatively tense exchange via WhatsApp with our host. There was no starter  tray of tea, coffee or milk, no kettle, no laundry detergent and the two sinks had unmovable plug/strainer systems. And the toilet had a half roll of toilet paper with no more stored in the bathroom. We are here for a four day stay.

Won’t dwell on it but a host who tries to tell me we don’t need the sink, just wash the dishes in running water “like I do” gets the title Giovanni the dickhead. He did eventually have to concede that the sinks were faulty and he would get them fixed. We told him to do that after we have gone. I am getting sick of making tea with a pot boiled on the nice modern induction top hob. There is just one tumbler sized glass in the house. Ann gets her Spritz in that, and I drink my beer from the bottle, in the time honoured manner. We did eventually find three toilet rolls stored in one of the kitchen cupboards. So Giovanni with his “Modern Flat Lecce” go down as needing to learn a bit on how to treat travellers who arrive in his house and want to make a drink or do some laundry. He will certainly get the crappy review he deserves.

We did a short walk on the evening we arrived through the nearest porto into the old town. The Chiesa del Rosario o di San Giovanni Batista is the first of the many very ornate churches here. This one has exclusion fencing around the front and a huge collar to prevent any of the bits crumbling off the top of the façade from falling onto the parishioners. Inside however it is very bright and ornate.

Sunday was the day for the more complete town tour, this time we walked along Viale Gallipoli to Porto Santa Biagio.

First port of call was Chiesa San Matteo, with it's ornate, white stone rounded façade. We had decided not to buy a town ticket to guarantee entry to each of the churches. There are about 21 in this small town, many distinguished by their very ornate exterior facades and their lavish interiors. Lecce is known as the Florence of the South and is particularly famous for its 17th Century Baroque soft creamy limestone architecture. Chiesa San Chiara was the next stop on the Piazzetta San Chiara, and looked quite like the previous chiesa. 

 

The walk through the narrow streets showed us plenty of lovely buildings, and intricate carvings adorning them. 

Lecce was also a strategic port in Roman times and this legacy is also prominent.In the centre of the town there is an excavation of a Roman amphitheatre, reputedly able to seat some 25,000 spectators. This is still in the slow process of excavation. Only a very small section has been exposed. It was identified originally when one of the banks started to construct a new building. That process had to stop so more archaeological work could be done.

Alongside the amphitheatre is a column of Sant’Oronzo, an early Christian martyr who was beheaded by Antonius because he would not sacrifice to the Roman gods. He is the Patron Saint of Lecce, attributed with stopping the bubonic plague devastating the town’s community, and in 1850 saving it from a cholera epidemic. Pretty outstanding qualifications for canonisation I'd say.

The city’s most ornate church is Chiesa di San Croce completed in the late 16th century. The piazza was very crowded on Sunday morning and almost impossible to do the edifice justice because of the crowds and the very difficult angles required to capture the whole façade, which you have to view from very close up, but a later early morning walk captured its impressive entirety. 

      

Just past a section of the old Roman road we paused our walk for due capuccini and a couple of the local pasticciotto, a shortcrust pastry filled with custard first made in the 17th century, reputedly from leftovers!

The Chiesa San Irene was fully wrapped and under refurbishment so not much of a picture opportunity today. The Catedrale Campanile, the Duomo, on the very big piazza also proved challenging because of crowds and the sun. I ended up deleting all the shots and we planned a revisit either earlier or later on a day when we could fix both those issues.

The final Porta of call was the Porta  Napoli entrance to the town with its ornate columns.

As mentioned earlier Lecce had strategic importance, which was particularly notable at the Museo Faggiano when we visited later in the day. The story behind its accidental museum status was that the building's owner set about to repair some faulty plumbing so he could open a restaurant on the ground floor and uncovered 2,000 years of history of underground corridors and rooms.

Along with a team of archeologists he discovered Messapi flooring, Roman cisterns, Greek vases and many other artefacts. The building had at one stage been a convent and even had escape tunnels and rooms for the town residents fleeing the regular invaders. (Messapi, Byzantine, Romans, Normans, Swabians, Aragonese.....) It certainly showed how many different cultures had called Lecce home over the centuries!

Monday’s trip was to Manduria for a wine tasting experience at a cooperative winemaker owned by 400 local grape growers. Most of the grapes grown are the variety Primitivo and it has only recently started to bottle its own products, having previously been exported to France.

The trip was made memorable when my phone ran out of roaming data so our navigation systems were out!! The Fiat’s GPS system is not reliable at identifying addresses (probably operator error), but we fortunately still managed to find the place and arrive on time.

The area under the processing floor was set up as a museum of the lives and lifestyles of those living in the region. The display areas used to be the storage facilities for the relatively low value wine. These were simply carved out of the bedrock.

We tasted four of the Co-op's products. Firstly a Rose made from the Primitivo grapes, with a Japanese name Aka, and a recommendation to drink with sushi, grilled salmon and seafood risotto. Not sure why it required the Japanese name. Nice wine though.

Next was Lirica, again all Primitivo and their Manduria D.O.C wine. Deeply coloured, dry, lightly oaked and with some cherry and plum flavours.

Elegia is the Riserva version of the above, picked a couple of weeks later and with a fractionally higher level of alcohol.

Madrigale is the dessert wine offering from the Primitivo grape. This one stays on the vine, drying on the plant and harvested late. This one is also at the 15% alcohol level, but the fermentation is stopped while there is about 6% residual sugar. A very nice dessert wine.

The rest of the day was a visit to Gallipoli, a small port, old town on the Ionian Sea coast. Beautiful clear waters, and a picturesque town, but plenty of tourists to share it with!

Our final day of touring from Lecce took us first to San Cataldo on the Adriatic Coast, a resort town with a nice white sandy beach. Note the remnants of  Roman pier out in the sea. 

Then we drove on the coast roads through many more of the coastal resorts. No high cliffs here just low sandy hills and scrubby coastal bush. None of the Amalfi glamour but lovely sandy beaches abound. 

We stopped at Otranto to see the famous Castle of Otranto of Gothic literature fame which was rather unimpressive and quite squat,

We also visited the Cathedrale Di Santa Maria Annunziata. This has a 'story of life' mosaic on the floors, and the area behind the altar has many bones including skulls from the 800 who died defending the town from the ottomans, in the Siege of Otranto. (Look closely at the altar photo.)

Again lots of tourists here; we walked the battlements, skipped a castle tour and had a picnic lunch in the shade adjacent to a small beach in the town.

Further south we stopped at Castro, on the coast again, a pretty little town, with a small harbour and a very good gelato shop. We opted for gelati rather than the climb up to the central piazza!

For our final Lecce night we had a meal booked at the La Vecchia Osteria, a short walk from the apartment. I started with the meatballs polperro, several different presentations of potato and a dough. Too much volume for me, but all very tasty. Ann’s was the seafood antipasto, very tasty but too much food. The second course was lamb fiorno, which is probably lamb stew, and not particularly tasty. The star of the evening was the waiter-recommended Pulia wine, a Neprica Negroamaro 2022.