Lecce and Salento: Baroque Stone and the End of Italy

Lecce is built in a stone so soft it was carved like butter, and the seventeenth-century masons who worked it covered every surface with figures, foliage and fantastical ornament that has no equivalent in Italian baroque architecture. The Salento coast below it is among the last wild Mediterranean coastlines. Together they form the most complete itinerary in the heel of Italy.

The honey-coloured stone from which Lecce is built — the pietra leccese, a calcarenite of such softness and uniformity that it can be worked with a knife when freshly quarried and hardens over decades of exposure to a warm, durable amber — is the primary reason for the specific character of Lecce's architecture. The Roman baroque that Bernini and Borromini produced in Rome was made in marble and travertine: stones that resist the chisel, that impose restraint and precision on the sculptor. The local baroque of Lecce was made in this extraordinary soft stone that imposes nothing and permits everything, and the result — visible on every church facade, every palazzo cornice and every doorway in the historic centre — is a decorative exuberance without parallel in Italian architecture: figures of atlantes and sea monsters, foliage that spirals around columns and capitals without pause, windows framed by architectural details of such complexity that the eye follows them for minutes without exhausting their inventive variety.

We design Lecce programmes with a specialist in southern Italian baroque who understands this architecture not merely as ornament but as a specific cultural achievement — the product of a city that had been, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most prosperous and most cosmopolitan in the Kingdom of Naples, whose merchant class used architectural commission as the primary means of demonstrating their status and their ambition.

The Basilica di Santa Croce, whose facade is the most elaborately decorated baroque church exterior in Italy; the Piazza del Duomo, whose enclosed harmony of cathedral, seminary and bishop's palace represents one of the finest baroque urban compositions in the country; and the Roman amphitheatre discovered beneath the main square — its cavea intact below street level — together define the essential Lecce programme. We visit them with the depth and the access that the standard touring itinerary does not provide.

The Valle d'Itria and the Trulli Country

North of Lecce, in the transition zone between the flat Salento plain and the karst plateau of the Murge, the Valle d'Itria preserves the trulli — the conical dry-stone dwellings constructed without mortar, their corbelled limestone roofs built by a technique found nowhere else in the world, their white limewashed walls decorated in some cases with symbolic figures whose pre-Christian origins are still debated. Alberobello, whose two UNESCO-listed districts of trulli are the most concentrated and the most visited, is best seen in the early morning before the day-trippers arrive; the countryside around Cisternino and Locorotondo, where trulli are scattered among olive groves and fig orchards in their working agricultural context, is more authentic and equally beautiful. Ostuni, the white city on its Murge ridge, with views over a plain of ancient olive trees extending to the Adriatic, is one of the most dramatically positioned towns in Puglia.

The Salento Coast: Otranto, the Sea Caves and the Two Seas

The coastline of the Salento alternates between limestone cliff headlands and bays of extraordinary water clarity — the Adriatic on the east side, the Ionian on the west, meeting at Santa Maria di Leuca at Italy's most southerly point in a visible clash of currents. Otranto, on the Adriatic coast, contains in its Romanesque cathedral the most magnificent medieval mosaic floor in existence: the entire nave covered in a twelfth-century programme by the monk Pantaleone depicting the Tree of Life and an encyclopaedic visual world of biblical, classical and contemporary imagery in coloured stone tesserae of great vivacity. The Castello Aragonese above the port, the martyrs' chapel and the old town walls complete a city of considerable historical weight. The coast south of Otranto is accessible by private boat from the marina — a series of sea caves, grottoes and small beaches reachable only from the water, the limestone cliffs meeting the turquoise sea in alternating formations of great natural drama.

Primitivo and Negroamaro: The Wines of the Ancient Vines

The flat, clay-rich soils of the Salento support some of the oldest planted vines in Italy — gnarled alberello Primitivo and Negroamaro bush vines, some a century old, trained without support in the traditional manner of the Phoenician colonists who introduced viticulture to this coast. The wines they produce — intensely coloured, generously fruited, concentrated by the Apulian sun to a warmth and a body that make them among the most immediately recognisable red wines in Italy — are beginning, at the finest estates, to achieve the kind of critical attention that their age, their character and their geological distinctiveness have always deserved. We visit the producers farming these centenarian alberelli for private tastings in the cellar and, where possible, in the vineyard itself, among the ancient vines whose presence in this landscape predates the Italian nation by two thousand years.

The facade of Santa Croce in Lecce, at ten in the morning with the sun directly on the pietra leccese, is one of the most densely beautiful surfaces in Italian architecture. Nothing in Rome or Venice prepared you for this particular quality of exuberant, sun-warmed, deeply regional excess.

The Essentials

Best season: April–June and September–October; the Salento coast at its best outside July–August

Signature experience: Private baroque tour of Lecce with an architectural specialist; sea cave private boat from Otranto

Stay: Lecce historic-centre masserie; or private masseria estates in the Salento countryside

Combine with: Matera (two hours north-west), Alberobello and the Valle d'Itria

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences,your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

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