Lecce
is a 2,000-year-old city with both Greco-Roman heritage and
a heavy dose of the 17th-century Baroque decorative style adorning the buildings--ornate,
intricate
carvings in many forms from fantastic cherubs and dragons to
naturalistic fruits and flowers, while Roman ruins stand in vivid
contrast
nearby.
As
in Taormina, Matera, and Alberobello, our tour manager Gaetano arranged
to have local guides give us tours. Our guide in Lecce (there she is, below) was
especially enthusiastic, even though she had a cold.
The lavishly decorated basilica of Santa Croce (begun in 1353
and not finished until 1695) was our first stop.
And, as long as we're doing churches, we also visited the great Cathedral in the Piazza del Duomo . . . .
We also had a demonstration (with one willing participant) of the ancient art of papier maché (cartapesta).
One
of my favorite sites in Lecce was the Piazza Sant'Oronzo. Sant'Oronzo
(seen atop a giant column below) is the patron saint of Lecce. Also
known as Saint Arontuis of Patenza, he was a Roman who converted to
Christianity and was eventually made bishop of Lecce, apparently by
Saint Paul himself, before being martyred in 303 AD by Roman
emperor Maximian. The Roman amphitheater in the piazza
is from c. 200-300 AD. By the way, our tour manager
Gaetano considered Sant'Oronzo a legendary figure; he claimed
there was no hard evidence that he actually existed. Our devoutly Catholic Leccese tour
guide begged to differ!
Our
first night in Lecce, we had dinner at a palazzo, followed
by musical
entertainment by the Pugliese band Criamu, to which we also attempted
to dance
the tarentella! On our way to the palazzo, we encountered a bit of gatto graffiti, and on the grounds of the palazzo, more Roman ruins--another amphitheater. . . .
The dance the two Pugliese women are doing (first pic below) is the "pizzica pizzica" (pinch pinch!), or the pizzica d'amore,
usually done by a man and a woman; the woman chooses her partner and
usually dances with a scarf, which she eventually throws for the man to
catch.
In the third pic the group is doing the tarentella. There's Gail smiling in the
dark sweater. Fortunately, there's no picture of me
dancing, although there is video evidence, which I'm withholding.
*********
On
our second day we took an excursion to Otranto on the gorgeous coast of
the Adriatic Sea (which lies serenely between Italy's "boot heel" and the Balkan
Peninsula).On
a very clear day, you can see Albania. We didn't see it; the horizon
was too hazy that day--although the sky was blue and the sea was, well,
aqua and turquoise.
As an erstwhile literary scholar, I read Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto,
so I was eager to see what I thought would be the basis for the haunted
castle in the gothic novel. But Gaetano assured me that the
present castle was built in 1480, a few hundred years after the setting of the novel (published in 1764).
Not far from the castle, we found yet another Italian kitten.
Next
we visited Otranto's cathedral, the Basilica Santa Maria Annunziata,
begun in 1080, with the amazing mosaic floor created in the mid-1160s.
Pews now cover an awful lot of it, as our pictures show, but this link from Italian Ways reveals it unencumbered. Running up the aisle is the Tree of Life, on which one can see images blending myth, history and Christian iconography. The mosaic even had its own "puss 'n boots"!
A
more macabre presence in the cathedral: some of the bones of 800
martyrs killed (when they refused to convert to Islam) by invading
Turks around 1480.
Our guide's favorite church, however, wasn't the cathedral but the older Byzantine Chiesa de San Pietro, with its many beautiful frescoes, some dating back to the 10th century.
