Italia 2023. Day 10 - Lecce

Yesterday I felt I had exhausted the tourist attractions of Brindisi, so I hopped on the train for the half-hour ride to Lecce, which is located very close to the tip of the heel of the Italian Boot. The heel itself is within the province of Puglia (written Apulia in English), which is a vast carbonate platform, where the horizontal beds support a vast number of caves, provide attractive cream-color building stones, and are suited for growing grapes, olives, and artichokes. To start with the latter, all the way from Bari in the north, through Brindisi, to Lecce there are vast orchards of olive trees. Most of the trees are very attractive, with a very broad base, a gnarly trunk, and a rounded mop of leaves. The very broad base puzzles me, because it looks like they planted a cluster of young trees and then grafted them together to form a single trunk. And how do they attain that perfect rounded crown? My olive trees look like an upside down witch's broom, and I cannot see any amount of pruning adopting the round shape that thousands upon thousands of trees have here (where is Giovanni when I need him?).

The other local product are artichokes, which apparently love the calcareous soil of the Puglia. Outside of that, I can see that the maritime weather (probably accompanied by morning fog) encourages the growth of this bizarre-looking vegetable. Like for rice, I should have suspected that Italy was a big producer of artichokes, since they are such an important part of Italian cuisine. Finally there are the grapevines, which at this time of the year are but empty crosses sticking out of the ground. They sure don't look like much, but there are lots of them!

The second characteristic of the Tertiary (?) limestones, as a building stone, gives the old architecture (Greek to Roman to Medieval, to even the 19th century) and very attractive harmonious look. Styles have changed, to be sure, but towns have a soothing cream tinge to them, that blends the architecture of 3,000 years into a coherent whole. In that regard, Lecce is a much more attractive city than Brindisi (it also makes navigating through it a lot more difficult, because one corner looks very much like the other). I loved the cathedral plaza (but was too cheap to pay for visiting the cathedral itself), and the many church facades and palazzos that grace so many of the small plazas scattered through the old city, but my all time favorite was the Roman theater, with its attached museum devoted to Comedy and Tragedy. The excavated half of the Roman colliseum, right in the middle of the old city, is nice, but I think it needs a good museum to go with it.

The CastroMediano Museum, on the southwest corner of the old city is very good indeed. They chose to divide the exhibition based on the origin of the artifacts, "from the sea to the land, and from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead". "From the sea" means a fascinating explanation of the role of the Puglia as the meeting place of the maritime ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, particularly since the heel of the boot is the point of entrance to the Adriatic. On the Italian side we had the cultures of the Salento coast, but who were the ones living on the opposite shore (now Albania)? And who were the traders that used the strait to move their wares? The Phoenicians? The answer to these questions is not that straightforward, and marine archaeologists keep unravelling the history of this interesting region. The museum also holds a beautiful collection of pottery that spans the Neolithic to the Greek to the Roman to the Medieval periods (I was looking for an opportunity to swipe a particularly lovely amphora ... just a small one, you understand). 

The caves of the region have produced an enticing collection of mortuary goods, starting with the Neanderthal 250,000 years ago and seeing the arrival of the Cromagnon culture 30,000 years ago. I have a fondness for the female figurines commonly referred as Venuses, and was happy to see one of them in the collection. They are among the oldest artistic manifestations of modern humans.

A highly satisfying trip to the very end of Italy.