November 7 - Lecce, Italy

Today would have been my husband’s 78th birthday.  Happy birthday, Darling wherever you are.

Today we docked in Brindisi, Italy on another sunny and warm day.  Brindisi is on the Adriatic coast down near the heel of the Italian peninsula.  This part of Italy isn’t too far from where my father’s family came.  My paternal grandfather emigrated to the US in the late 19th century from a small village not far from Bari, just up the coast from here.  As a child I remember making a road trip down one side of the Italian boot and up the other so we could visit what my father called “God’s country.”  The southern part of the boot has quite a different look and feel to it than the regions up north and closer to the Alps and the Apennines.  It’s drier for one thing and parts almost look arid.  It’s the land of many olive and citrus groves.

I decided to take a tour to the city of Lecce, known as the Florence of the south because of the Baroque architecture found there.  If you think of the heel of the Italian boot as a spiked heel, Brindisi is close to where the heel and the rest of the sole meet and Lecce is closer to the tip of the heel.  Anyway, we had about a 35 minute bus ride to get to Lecce through fields with olive trees.  There was some kind of blight here in recent years and so many of the trees were dying. But fields of little trees which must be resistant to the blight have been planted nearby.  

I write about what interests me and/or tickles my fancy so bear with me.  Before we entered the walled city we stopped at a public restroom .  Here we are in the year 2025 when Japanese have toilets with so many buttons it’s hard to know which one to push to get the desired result.  Yet here in Italy with its thousands of years of history and civilization, this public WC toilet had no seats, no toilet paper rolls and barely flushing buttons.  We each had to pay €1 to get one sheet of paper towel to use.  As a half Italian I find it sad, but at least we’re better than some of the countries I’ve visited.  Caesar must be shaking his head though.

Onward.  We were dropped off at one of the main city gates and began our very long walk through the city.  The prevalent stone around here is called “Lecce stone,” a very soft limestone which is easy to work with and thus there are many sculptures on the buildings.  The city was founded by a people I’d never heard of called the Mesapii around the 12th century BC. Around the third century BC the Romans came along and conquered it.  Among the sights we saw were the ruins of an ancient amphitheater built by the latter.  They did like their theaters because it seems most anywhere one goes in this part of the world there are ruins of one. After the fall of the western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD the goths sacked the city.   In the next century the Eastern Roman Empire took the city back.  They kept Lecce and the surrounding area for 500 years with brief incursions by Saracens and Lombards.  In the 11th century an entirely new group showed up, the Normans.  Yes those guys who conquered Britain came south too.  (Just a little side note.  My Italian grandfather who came from around here and who should have had typical Italian coloring with dark hair and olive skin, instead had red hair and greenish eyes and used to be called “Irish Mike” by some of his work colleagues in the US.  Could there be some Norman blood running through my veins?)

I wanted to put this photo here to remind myself in the future to never go to one of these cities when it's wet.  The pavement would be a virtual skating rink.

We here in the US have a hard time learning our own history, let alone that of other countries.  Places like Italy are especially difficult because for so long it was conquered by so many civilizations and was a conglomerate of city-states.  It wasn’t even unified until 1861.  So it was that Lecce and its surrounding land was part of a Norman kingdom until it became part of the Holy Roman Empire ruled first by Austrians , then by Bourbons who were related to both Spanish and French kings.  When Napoleon became Emperor he gave this part of Italy and Sicily to his sister who became Queen of Sicily and Naples.  Are you confused?  I am.  I’ve read sometimes that Italian politics are chaotic and confused.  The country comes by it honestly based on a long history of chaos and confusion.

We walked through the city and saw the winding streets lined with buildings with big wooden doorways with decorative door-knockers.  The doorways led to hidden courtyards which we couldn’t see but where in days gone by, people conducted their business and took their leisure.  Multi-generational families occupied the larger buildings and kept their carriages and horses within the lower parts of the palazzos.  Nowadays many have been divided into apartments.  

Besides the ruins of the amphitheater we visited two churches, the Lecce Cathedral and the Church of Santa Croce (Holy Cross).  If you guessed that the latter is so named because it has on one of its altars a crucifix which contains at its center a sliver of the cross from Gethsemane you are correct.  The churches are both constructed of the white lecce stone and to seal the stone milk was used (limestone is quite soft and the process helped to preserve it).  Interestingly some of the statuary and even some of the smaller columns are made of papier-mâché.  That’s right, the technique that some of us used as children in school to make volcanoes or other things is an art form here in Lecce used to create intricate statues and figurines.  In case you don’t remember, paper is shredded and mixed with water and a binder (even flour) to make a sturdy pulp which can then be formed into various forms.

Just a couple pictures of churches

This one is interesting because those columns are actually not stone or marble.  They are papier-mâché!

Outside the church was a workshop where they still make papier-mâché figures.  This one on display there.

Following our visits to the churches we had a light lunch in one of those palazzos we walked past.  Stepping through the doors was like stepping into another bygone era.  The first floor rooms were open to us and they were furnished in chintzes and designs which looked like they came from a Victorian garden.  The rooms were over-furnished with hardly an empty space and not a single flat surface that didn’t have something placed on it. There was a little garden courtyard with lots of flowers.  We ate a lunch of pasta, a couple of types of pizza, and dessert which was kind of a brownie and some pudding, accompanied of course by wine.  It was good, not great.

The anteroom of the palazzo where we had lunch

The palazzo's courtyard

Our dining room

Then it was time to walk back through the winding streets to the city gate and our waiting bus.  I must say I was tired.  We walked more than five miles and my knees let me know they don’t really like that much anymore.  I was glad it was a sunny day, because the pavement in all these places is stone and marble and when wet it can be like a skating rink.  All in all it was a nice day.  I confess though that I’m getting tired of seeing churches and ruined amphitheaters.  I don’t think it’s that I’ve become jaded; I think it’s more that I find meeting people far more interesting.  We have a sea day tomorrow so I can rest my knees and feet and perhaps catch up on writing.  Ciao for now!