First Few Days in Lecce

I won’t torture you with my hellish travel saga. It seems to be the way travel goes these days. Let’s just say I was supposed to arrive in Italy at midnight on January 6th and actually arrived January 7th at 6pm. A tale for later.

Sheryl and I are travelling with our good friends from Sweden, Lennart and Kerstin. We went to Portugal together two years ago (you can read about Portugal in an earlier blog trip). They are delightful travelling companions. They also had a long delay in their train trips (yes, they decided to train instead of fly - Lennart is actually a leader in the Green Party). We are staying in the most palatial airbnb we have ever seen. 7-8 meters (24-27 feet) high vaulted ceilings with rooms lavishly tiled floors and elegant antique furniture. Take a look at the pictures. Just incredible.

A friend, Rhonda, from North Vancouver had suggested Lecce. She said we could spend days wandering around enjoying the place. She was not wrong. Lecce is located in the heel of Italy’s boot near the sea but not on the ocean. It has an old walled center with towering gate entrances - only three of the four gates remain. They say about 5,000 people still live inside the old town and another 95,000 live in the surrounding city. The weather has been perfect for the first three days we have been here: mostly sunny and relatively warm.

Like many southern Italian (and European) cities, the history and architecture are buried layer by layer. Our first stop took us to this ruin discovered quite by accident by a local family who wanted to renovate the place from a three family rental into a restaurant. The law says you need special permits to dig down more than 50 cm (about 20 inches). Unfortunately, his first repair work discovered that the sewer pipe was deeper than that. Well, what they discovered was a medieval flooring over Roman ruins over Messapians (3rd century B.C.) artifacts, including secret passageways, cisterns for spring water and hundreds and hundreds of everyday and ritualistic objects. They called in an archeologist to supervise the dig where every night they would review the spoils and take them away to be stored by the local and federal government. Bones were also discovered convincing the family not to open a restaurant but turn the whole thing into a museum. They are slowly expanding and finding even more history of the peoples who lived there. To me it is all endlessly fascinating.

We also took a tour of the Jewish history nearly completely lost. Again, community members wanted to both uncover the rich cultural and architectural treasures of the Lecce Jewish peoples. It has been funded and directed most entirely by donors. Our guide took us down to a discovered mikveh (ablution bath that Jewish women use and used to purify themselves after their menstrual period, childbirth and before marriage). There is some legend/myth that a river flows under the city, but most likely these pools were fed by the area springs. Lennart’s first career was as an hydrologist engineer (I may be saying this wrong). He was super interested in these underground pools and systems. Love that.

The Jews were not allowed to own land but lived generally peaceably in Lecce starting around the 15th century. They were, however, required to wear symbols on their clothing marking them as Jews. The synagogue was destroyed along with the entire Jewish quarter in 1463 when the last local Count of Lecce died and Ferdinand I, King of Aragon took over. Sigh.

Of course we have visited a batch of churches. Lecce is saturated with soft sandstone buildings, statuary, and all manner of exquisite Baroque filigree and designs. Each sculpture tells a story. We heard many of them, but you could spend just weeks and weeks exploring the city discovering the history and religious and secular politics they depict. Lecce is also known for its paper mache life-size sculptures throughout the churches.

We have eaten good Italian pasta along with a couple local pastries - pasticciotti a small loaf-shaped nummy with a short crust and cream/pastry cream inside. You can get it with or without chocolate. Of course, we have had nice wine with our meals. A real vacation!

I can only put 20 photos per post so see the next post for more.

Tomorrow we are renting a car to drive over to Otranto. I know nothing about it…Lue lisää