Three days in Lecce: stone soft enough to carve with a knife, and they did

Two nights in the baroque capital of the south, with a Roman arena sunk into the middle of the main square and a day on the Adriatic at the far edge of Italy.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Lecce
Places
7 across 3 days
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Lecce is built out of a limestone that comes out of the ground pale gold and soft enough to work with a pocket knife, and hardens once it is exposed to the air. Give that material to a town full of masons with money from olive oil and Spanish patronage, and you get facades covered in fruit, angels, dragons, obelisks, pomegranates and human faces, layered on until there is no flat surface left.

The result got it called the Florence of the south, which undersells it: nothing in Florence looks remotely like this. It is the most concentrated baroque town in Italy after the Sicilian ones, and it is in the heel, five hours from Rome and three from Naples, which is why it stays comparatively unbothered.

It is also small, flat and walled, so two nights covers it comfortably with a day on the coast built in. And it is cheap. Puglia is the last part of Italy where a serious dinner still costs what a plate of pasta costs in Venice.

Highlights

  • A church front so densely carved that a visiting historian called it the work of a lunatic
  • A Roman amphitheatre for twenty-five thousand people, dug out from under the paving and left open
  • A cathedral floor mosaic from the 1160s with a tree of life, a zodiac and King Arthur in it
  • A custard-filled pastry eaten warm at eight in the morning, which is what breakfast is here

Where to stay

Lecce, two nights

A Messapian and then Roman town in the flat limestone plain of the Salento peninsula, which had its moment under Spanish rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and spent it entirely on architecture.

The old town is walled, mostly pedestrian, and built from one material, so it reads as a single object rather than a collection of buildings. Underneath it is the Roman town, which keeps surfacing whenever anybody digs.

Day by day

Day 1 in Lecce

The carved church, and the closed square

Start with the building everybody comes for. It took a century and a half to finish, and the front is a wall of carving: a rose window held up by cherubs, a base of grotesque figures straining under the weight of it, animals, fruit, and a great deal that nobody has ever fully explained. A nineteenth century writer put it down to a madman's imagination, which the town has taken as a compliment ever since.

Then walk to the cathedral square, which is unlike any other in Italy because it has only one entrance. You come through a narrow arch and the space opens out on all four sides, a closed courtyard with a bell tower seventy metres high in the corner. It was designed to be defensible, and at night, lit, with nobody in it, it is the best thing in the town.

Eat late and cheaply. This is a university town as well as a baroque one and the prices reflect it.

  1. 16:00

    Church of the Holy Cross

    Religious

    Begun in 1549 and finished in 1695, which is why the bottom half is restrained and the top half is not. Stand well back on the opposite pavement, then go close and start picking out individual figures.

  2. 17:30

    Cathedral

    Religious

    Designed largely by Giuseppe Zimbalo, with two fronts because the square's single entrance meant the side people actually see needed one too. Climb the bell tower for the whole town and, on a clear day, both coasts of the peninsula.

  3. 20:30

    Dinner and a Primitivo

    Eat

    Orecchiette with turnip tops, then something grilled, in one of the courtyards off the main streets. Under thirty euros a head with wine, comfortably.

With more time: The church of Saint Irene, on the main street between the two, is plainer outside and has a set of eleven baroque altars inside, gilded and enormous, which is the other half of the local style: sober stone in public, extravagance behind the door.

Day 2 in Lecce

Otranto, the easternmost town in Italy

An hour east by train or car is a small white port on the Adriatic that is the furthest east you can go in Italy, close enough to Albania to see the mountains on a clear day.

Its cathedral has a floor. In the 1160s a monk laid a mosaic across the whole nave: a tree of life growing from the west door to the altar, with the months of the year, biblical scenes, elephants, a mermaid and King Arthur on a goat, all in coloured stone. It is one of the strangest and best things in southern Italy and almost nobody outside Puglia has heard of it.

Off the same church is a chapel of skulls. In 1480 an Ottoman fleet took the town and killed the men who refused to convert, eight hundred of them by tradition, and their bones are stacked in glass cases behind the altar. The two things are ten metres apart and it is a strange building to walk around.

  1. 10:30

    Cathedral

    Religious

    Consecrated in 1088 and plain from outside. The mosaic floor covers the entire nave and you walk on it, which is the disconcerting part. Give it half an hour and follow the tree from the door.

  2. 12:15

    Church of San Pietro

    Religious

    A small Byzantine church in the lanes below, cross-shaped and domed, with frescoes going back to the tenth century. Often locked; ask at the cathedral or wait for the volunteer to open it.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch at the harbour

    Eat

    Raw sea urchins in spring, fried fish the rest of the year, at a table on the front. The water here is the clearest on this coast and you can see the bottom from the quay.

  4. 15:15

    Aragonese Castle

    Historic

    Three round towers and a heavy rampart, rebuilt after the Ottoman siege by people who had learned their lesson. It hosts exhibitions now, and the walk around the walls above the sea is free.

With more time: With a car, drive twenty minutes south to the lighthouse on the headland, which stands on the easternmost point of Italy, and then on down the coast road past the abandoned bauxite quarry, which has filled with green water and turned the surrounding earth deep red.

Day 3 in Lecce

The Roman town under the baroque one

Lecce's main square has a Roman amphitheatre in it. It was found in the 1900s under the paving, only about a third of it has been excavated because the rest is under the buildings around the square, and it seated twenty-five thousand people when the town was a Roman colony.

A few streets away is a smaller and better story. In 2001 a man renovating his house to open a trattoria started digging for a sewage pipe, found a tomb, and kept going for years: Messapian cisterns, Roman drains, a Templar-era chamber, medieval frescoes and a grain store, all stacked under one ordinary terraced house. He gave up on the restaurant and opened the house instead.

Then a last pasticciotto and the ten minute walk to the station.

  1. 09:30

    Roman amphitheatre

    Historic

    Visible from the pavement without paying anything, sunk in the middle of the square with the baroque town standing on top of it. Second century AD, and the excavated section is the good half with the seating.

  2. 10:45

    Museo Archeologico Faggiano

    Culture

    Twelve rooms on several levels, all found by one family with a shovel, connected by ladders and glass floors. Small, cheap, slightly homemade, and the most memorable hour in Lecce.

  3. 12:30

    Pasticciotto, then the train

    Eat

    Warm, custard-filled and about a euro, from a bakery rather than a café. Then south out of the walls to the station.

With more time: The provincial archaeological museum, the oldest in Puglia, is five minutes away and holds the Greek and Messapian pottery dug out of the plain, which is where all this started long before anybody carved a facade.

Before you go

Where to stay

Inside the walls, which enclose a compact oval you can cross in fifteen minutes. Anything within a few streets of the main square puts you within walking distance of everything here, and the old palazzi converted into small hotels are good value by Italian standards.

The station is a ten minute walk south of the walls, which makes arriving easy. Staying out at the coast is lovely in summer and turns Lecce into a drive, which is the wrong way round for a short trip.

Getting there and around

Brindisi airport is forty minutes away by bus or train and is the nearest; Bari is an hour and a half by train and has more flights. From Rome the fast train takes about five and a half hours, which is a real journey and part of why the region stays quiet.

In town, walk. To reach the coast, the local railway and the summer bus network cover the main towns, but Salento is a place where a hire car genuinely changes what is possible: the good beaches, the masserie and the small baroque towns are all twenty minutes apart and badly connected by public transport.

Timing and opening

Nothing here needs booking. A combined ticket covers the cathedral, its bell tower, the baptistery and the diocesan museum, and the tower is worth the climb for the roofscape of carved stone.

The town keeps southern hours: churches and shops shut from around one until four or five, and the streets are genuinely empty in the middle of an August afternoon. Reorganise the day around that rather than fighting it, and eat dinner at nine like everybody else.

Eating

Salento cooking is vegetables, bread and sea. Orecchiette with turnip tops. Fava bean puree with wild chicory. Puccia, a round bread roll split and filled at a counter. Horse meat in tomato sauce, cooked for hours in a sealed pot. And sea urchins in spring, eaten raw off the shell by the dozen at the coast.

The two things to know about breakfast are pasticciotto, a small oval of shortcrust filled with custard and eaten warm, and rustico, a puff pastry disc of bechamel, tomato and mozzarella. Both cost about a euro. The wine is Primitivo and Negroamaro, both dark and warm, and both very cheap here.

The pleasure of Lecce is that it never became a destination. There are visitors, but the town is doing its own thing: students on the steps, old men in the square, the pastry shops full at eight in the morning.

Walk it at night with the stone lit up, and go and eat something you have not heard of.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Lecce worth three days?
Two nights, yes, with one day out. The old town itself is a long afternoon and an evening, and the reason to stay is Salento: the coast, the small towns and the food, which is the actual draw. If you are not going to leave the walls, two days is enough.
Do I need a car?
Not for Lecce, and yes for the rest of Salento. Otranto and Gallipoli are reachable by train, but the beaches, the olive country and the smaller baroque towns are not, and the local timetables assume you are a student rather than a visitor.
Lecce or Matera?
They are three hours apart and completely different. Matera is a cave town cut into a ravine, extraordinary and very busy. Lecce is a living provincial city with better food and fewer visitors. On a Puglia trip most people do both, with Matera as the shorter stop.
When should I come?
May, June, September and October. August in Salento is when all of Italy arrives, the coast is full and the town is thirty-eight degrees. Winter is mild and quiet and the stone looks best under low sun, though the coast largely closes.
Are the beaches any good?
Some of the best in Italy, and there are two coasts twenty minutes apart. The Adriatic side south of Otranto is rocky with clear deep water; the Ionian side around Gallipoli is white sand and shallow. Both need a car and both are packed in August.