No. 02 - Lecce & the Salento

Arriving earlier in the day? Drive fifteen minutes east to San Cataldo, Lecce's own stretch of coast, for a first swim, or walk through the Castello Carlo V, the sixteenth-century fortress at the edge of the old town. Both leave the churches for the evening, when the stone is at its warmest.

Pietra leccese is a pale limestone that cuts with a knife when quarried and hardens in the air. That one property is why a provincial city could carve like a capital: the labour was affordable, so the ambition could be enormous. Look at the front of Santa Croce — there is hardly a flat surface on it.

The first order is a caffè leccese — espresso over ice with almond syrup — at Caffè Alvino on Sant'Oronzo, with a rustico or a pasticciotto. Dinner at Le Zie, where you ring a doorbell and eat in what is effectively someone's dining room, or Osteria da Angiulino for the louder version.

The city runs on its own clock. Shutters come down at one and go up again at half past four; at seven the whole of Lecce is out on Via Trinchese, pushchairs and all. The bakeries near Porta Napoli bring the pasticciotti out warm at eight in the morning and are usually sold out by eleven.

When the heat makes the streets unusable, take the interiors: the Teatro Paisiello, a small nineteenth-century theatre in pistachio and cherry-red velvet, and the papier-mâché workshops the city has kept going since the eighteenth century — cartapesta, a poor city's answer to marble, still made by hand a few streets from the cathedral. A third door, opened only in 2021: the Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud, a private collection of twentieth-century Italian art given to the city and hung in a palazzo off Piazzetta Baglivi. Four hundred years of Baroque, and then a room of Fontana and Boetti.

Evening is the passeggiata and then dinner. The city has a real restaurant scene rather than a tourist one; the rule is to eat where the menu is short.

The limestone holds the day's heat and gives it back after dark, so the evenings stay warm long after the light has gone. For things to take home, the lanes behind the Duomo and Via Palmieri have the cartapesta workshops and a few ceramicists; the morning market on Piazza Libertini is fruit and enamelware, not souvenirs.

Drive between them slowly. Corigliano has a moated castle with a Baroque face, Sternatia an underground oil press, and none of them has a ticket office. Twenty minutes north-east, Acaya is the opposite kind of place: a fortified town drawn on a grid and built from nothing in 1535, one of the few Renaissance planned towns in the south and still barely bigger than its own walls. Lunch wherever the sign says ciceri e tria — chickpeas with fried and boiled pasta in the same bowl.

The one fixed stop is Galatina. The Basilica di Santa Caterina d'Alessandria is plain outside and completely frescoed inside — a fourteenth-century cycle over every surface, one of the great painted interiors of the south, and almost nobody in it. Galatina is also where tarantism lived: the ritual in which women said to have been bitten were danced back to health, and the pizzica played to do it.

Mornings here sound different: men on plastic chairs outside the bar at seven with the radio going, and one bar to each village that is also the newsagent and the place you pay the water bill. Order a caffè and a spumone in Calimera or Sternatia, and buy a puccia wherever there is a queue.

Porto Selvaggio is four hundred hectares of Aleppo pine running down to a rocky cove between two watchtowers. You park above and walk twenty minutes down through the trees, which keeps the numbers down; there is no sand and no bar. Swim, then walk back up. Santa Maria al Bagno, the old bathing village a few minutes south, has the afternoon coffee.

Dinner in Nardò at Antica Trattoria Salandra, in a lane behind the piazza.

The Ionian shelves gently and warms early: by June it swims at eight in the morning, when the water off Santa Maria al Bagno is still glassy and the light comes from behind you. Take a towel and nothing else — Porto Selvaggio has no bar, little shade at the bottom and nowhere to buy water. Nardò's shops shut hard at one.

Below the old town lie the frantoi ipogei — olive presses cut into the rock, where until the nineteenth century Gallipoli pressed the lamp oil that lit much of northern Europe. The morning before it belongs to the inland villages, Parabita and Matino, where the blight is most visible and the replanting is too — young trees in rows between the grey ones.

Dinner on the walls: La Puritate for the classic version, La Vinaigrette on the terrace above the water for the modern one.

The fish market on the harbour side is finished by nine and worth the early start for the noise of it alone. By evening the lanes smell of frying and salt. The water inside the walls at the Purità beach is flat enough to swim before breakfast, when it is mostly locals in the water.

Lunch at Tricase Porto, at the taverna on the harbour where the menu changes with the catch. Spend the afternoon at the small rocky swimming spots of the south-east: Marina Serra, a natural rock pool, or the Ciolo inlet, where a bridge crosses a ravine that drops straight into the sea.

Then north up the Adriatic side, which is higher and colder: Castro, a walled town on a headland with the Grotta Zinzulusa below it — stalactites reached along the shore, named for the rags they were thought to resemble. Dinner where you sleep.

There is no sand at all on this stretch. The days are rock, ladders and deep, cold, very clear water, so bring something to sit on. Marina Serra fills after eleven and empties again at six. Inland, Tricase and Specchia have the ordinary shops — a fruttivendolo, a macelleria, and a bar that makes granita to order in the morning.

Otranto for the middle of the day: a compact walled town, an Aragonese castle on the water, and in the cathedral the finest single thing on this route — its floor. Between 1163 and 1165 a priest named Pantaleone laid a mosaic across the entire nave — a Tree of Life carrying Alexander the Great, King Arthur, the months, elephants and the zodiac in one image. People have been walking across it for more than eight hundred years.

The afternoon at Baia dei Turchi or Porto Badisco, the horseshoe bay where Virgil has Aeneas land — or, ten minutes south of town, the Cave di Bauxite, a disused quarry of red earth around a still green pool. There is nothing to do there and no swimming; you go for the colours, which are best in the last hour of light. The farewell dinner where you are sleeping; the Otranto estates cook from their own gardens.

Dawn at Punta Palascìa is cold enough for a jumper even in July, and the drive back into Otranto lands just as the bakeries open. The bay inside the walls is shallow and calm — the local swim rather than the postcard one. North of town the Alimini lakes have eucalyptus, pines and often a strong wind: welcome on a hot day, too much on others.

Then inland for the airport, past the grey rows and the knee-high trees planted between them by people who will not live to harvest them. Ninety minutes north, around Ostuni, the old trees are still standing — that is where Journey I begins.

Come before nine and the pool is still in shadow, the rock cold underfoot and the water the colour it is in the photographs; by eleven there is a queue. There is a bar in the car park and nothing else. If you have time before the flight, the coast road north to Torre dell'Orso and San Foca is worth the extra half hour.