Milk-White Lecce

My favorite city in Italy

(DATELINE CHRIS)

The tourist guides all tell you that Lecce is a lovely city, and if you find yourself in Puglia (probably because you got lost), they will definitely tell you to spend a day (two would be too many!) in Lecce. Italians will tell you they agree (though they'll suspiciously avoid the subject if you let them). They seem to look at Puglia as the Alabama of their country. It's out of the way, charming, a bit down at the heels (pun not intended), and while it has okay beaches, there are a lot of better beaches you might as well go to instead.

But that can't be right, because why is every single person in Italy strolling down Via Vittorio Emanuele II on a Friday night in late August?

Via Vittorio Emanuele II leads from Piazza San Oronzo and
Piazza Del Duomo, Lecce's two central squares 

And unlike Florence or Cinque Terre or Venice, almost all of these people were speaking Italian. It's almost like Italy is trying to hide something from you. In the summer, when Italians can choose anywhere in the country to go, they're not cuing up with the Americans to find a new angle from which to photograph David, they've headed to Puglia.

Puglia, almost entirely made up of the Salento Peninsula, is the heel on the Italian boot. It is flat and sunbaked, and surrounded by the sea on all sides. There's not too much to see here but olive trees, rock walls, half completed or half destroyed buildings and transparent seawater. We never would have travelled here, but for our realization that you can take a ferry from Bari (which even Leccites will tell you is a pit) to Dubrovnik, so we had some time to kill between Sorrento and Croatia. A day in Lecce? Why not?

We read the guidebooks, took their advice, and booked ourselves for one full day (two nights) in Lecce. But when we arrived, and saw our absolutely perfect flat, and walked around one block in Lecce, we decided to stay four nights, booking all our remaining time in Italy.

Lecce has a regional cuisine that is built on a prideful poverty - la cucina povera - Lecce menus often have a story about how their cuisine was developed by ancestors who had to turn over their fancier ingredients to rich northerners. You'll find Orecchiette mixed with chickpeas here, little sandwiches called puccia, pretzel-like crackers called taralli and cheap and vibrant local wines. Where you find meat, it's often to cater to visitors, because meat was rare on traditional tables. No less an authority than Phillip "The Chef" Musegaas visited Lecce before us and served as a valuable source of info.

Lecce is my favorite city in Italy for walking. It doesn't have grand avenues that open up dramatic views of world famous marble-monuments, it has winding streets that are made mostly of limestone, that, when you come around a corner, reveal architectural wonders that your camera cannot capture (because you can't back far enough away from to fit the sight in your viewfinder) but your eye appreciates.

I think this is Palazzo dei Celestine, poorly captured in its grandeur with a panoramic shot

And its not just the grand things, but also little details created by people who couldn't work with fancy materials, so instead learned to carve every ounce out of the limestone.

Detail of the stonework above the Palazzo's entryway

Lecce's churches don't have Michelangelos, or gilded ceilings or stained glass, they have absolutely bonkers carved limestone altars.

I wasn't allowed to take this picture, but I didn't know it

Lecce is the sort of place where you'll walk down a street at random and come to a Roman theater, being used, that very moment, for a ballet performance, and then after a couple more random turns, come to a Roman amphitheater, being used, that very moment, for a choral performance. This really happened to me the second night we were in Lecce. Lecce is so boss, that this is the town seal:

Yeah, that's a black she-wolf, strutting beneath a lemon tree, on a shield, under a crown. That is more boss than any Game of Thrones sigil; not even close.

But you can't spend your life simply strolling alabaster streets under azure skies, snacking on street sandwiches, washing them down with red wine and chasing it with the best gelato I had in Italy - actually, who says you can't? Shouldn't we at least test out where you can before we jump to conclusions? - we rented a car so we could hit the many, many beaches around Lecce.

First, let me say, we rented a boss car. The Alfa Romeo Giulietta 1.6 JTDM-2 120 5 door diesel had all the torque our Fiat 500 lacked, and got amazing gas mileage (all our driving around Puglia, and then ultimately to Bari, still left the tank about half full). Top Gear lists its gas mileage as 74.3 MPG. Dear Alfa Romeo, why are you importing the stupid Giulia burning gas instead of the Giulietta burning diesel? We know why you're importing the 4C - YOWZA! 

If they ever bring this car to the US, buy it.

We used our Alfa to visit three beaches east and west of Lecce, each about a 30-40 minute drive:

Conchiglie Alto Lido, on the outskirts of Gallipoli:

Otis prepares to dive

Torre Dell'orso, closest beach east of Lecce as the crow flies:

Jen stakes out the beach at Torre Dell'orso

Otis demonstrates Blue Steel

And here Otis demonstrates Ferrari 

and Otranto, a fortified medieval city with a historic cathedral with a bonkers floor we couldn't get into because it was closed for Siesta.

Otranto had to compensate for a little problem they kept having with the Turks, the only way into the walled city is STILL a big-assed drawbridge.

Look at that water though, you can see why the Turks wanted to come!

Look at those pictures! Look at that water!

Go! Lecce and Puglia are marvels! Go quickly too, the New York Times can't shut up about Lecce and Puglia these days. Soon it too, will be full of Americans!

Hell, even Bari was nice :)