Lovely Lecce

nother very nice thing about San Cataldo is that it's near a lot of other interesting towns, particularly Lecce.

Danny and I visited this famous baroque city during our last trip to the Italian South, some twenty-five years ago. We stopped by on our way to somewhere else, and we weren't impressed. I was expecting beautiful baroque buildings, but everything we saw looked plain and 19th-century. We had a nice lunch in a restaurant in an empty square and drove on to our next destination.



We must have been in the wrong part of town back then, because when we visited Lecce this time we saw madly ornamented buildings, in the area's trademark golden stone, all over the place.

The insides of some of the churches embraced the same aesthetic. Some people find this stuff vain and insincere, but I can't get enough of it myself.

I forgot to write down which church this was in, but it hardly matters.

There's also a big Roman amphitheater right in the middle of town. Sant'Onorzo, the patron saint of Lecce, is standing on the pillar to the right. He has his back to the amphitheater, perhaps because the Romans beheaded him.

Our favorite place in Lecce was the Museo Faggiano, a private home whose owner, while doing some sewer repairs in 2001, discovered a network of tombs, tunnels, wells, and storage rooms below the house. After seven years of archeaological excavations, the place was opened to the public. It is a fascinating (and claustrophobic) window into life in medieval Italy. I kept imagining what it must have smelled like when all those little tunnels and rooms were full of sweaty Knights Templar and monks and recently buried corpses.

In the part that used to be a cloister, the monks (or nuns?) apparently used broken pottery to decorate the walls, or just fill in cracks. I loved the way that looks--very Urban Outfitters.

If you want to see more of the underground rooms, the museum's web siteweb site has much better photos than I was able to take.

Danny and I had such a good time there we even succumbed to the impulse to take vacation photos of each other.