Galatina, Gallipoli and the Trip Home

Wednesday-Thursday, October 28-29, 2015

 We left Lecce after breakfast for a trip west to the Gulf of Taranto, the body of water between the heel and the sole of the boot of Italy, which is part of the Ionian Sea. 

  

Our first stop was in the town of Galatina where we visited the Church of Santa Caterina built in the 13 c. and famous for its frescos “in the style of Giotto.” 

  

Well, Giotto they definitely are not.  Seeing them gave us renewed appreciation for Giotto:

We traveled on to Gallipoli, Italy (not a town of the same name in Turkey, where the famous battle took place in 1915).  This is a beautiful port town:

 There’s a beach and there were a few intrepid people on the beach and in the water:

 There’s a wonderful fish market and there are loads of mussels:

This was a famous olive oil exporting port for hundreds of years, and we visited an old “frantoio”, one of the presses used to produce the oil.  A horse or donkey was used to pull the stone round and round:

We stopped for a photo of the six of us on a narrow street overlooking the sea:

 Lunch was at yet another lovely masseria, this one named St. Andrea:

  

There are small cottages on the premises, and fanciful signs which didn’t make much sense.  This one is on the front door to one of the guest rooms:

 We had a wonderful lunch in a beautiful room with a fire to take off the chill:

  

After lunch Sheila and Peter left us to begin their travels home, as they have a flight tomorrow from Milan and need to get there this evening.  The four of us remaining took a long walk passing olive harvests:

 We wound up at La Cutura, an amazing botanical garden (http://www.lacutura.it/giardino_botanico.php ).  Here’s part of the cactus and succulent house:

The garden is enormous, and we walked some of it, but it was getting dark, and we were exhausted.  We drove back to Lecce for our final (and wonderful) dinner in Apulia.

Thursday morning we said goodbye to Ido and Enzo at the Brindisi airport and flew to Milan where we stayed at a very ordinary airport hotel.  Friday we flew home—totally uneventfully, and began the decompression from a truly wonderful trip.

Otranto and Lecce

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

We began the day with a drive to Otranto, the easternmost point in Italy, and way down the heel, where the Adriatic Sea meets the Ionian Sea, just 25 miles or so from the Albanian coast:

  

The old city of Otranto is another UNESCO World Heritage Site, featuring the Otranto castle, Castello Aragonese, which is truly massive.  It was a wonderful protection against attacks from the water:

In the shop windows were “pupa liccese” dolls which were explained to us as figures used by local custom for engagements:

  

After touring the castle we went to the Mosaico Otranto Cathedral, consecrated in 1088, which is famous for the enormous mosaic floor, perhaps the largest in the world, made between 1163 and 1165 by local artisans supervised by a local priest.  The main theme is a tree of life:

From Wikipedia (in translation from Italian), “The iconography of the mosaic is spread through scenes from Old Testament, from the cycles of chivalry, and the bestiary medieval, from the novel by Alessandro. The images are arranged along the development of the tree of life, trace the human experience from original sin to salvation.”  Well, things here range from easy to understand to pretty unusual.  Here are Abraham Isaac and Jacob:

Here’s a creature with a human head, a four-legged animal’s body, two rear legs, a human foreleg, and a human arm:

Here’s a sort of lion head with four bodies:

There is a beautiful early 18^th c. organ:

And there’s a terrible story.  In 1480 the Turks were in control and required conversion to Islam for all the residents.  800 of the local populace refused and were beheaded.  Their remains are sealed in the Chapel of the Martyrs, and the bones are on view:

The 800 were beatified by the Pope, which is interesting, as there was a significant Jewish population here, and it’s not for sure that all the 800 who were beheaded were Christians.  Thus it’s quite possible that there are some beatified Jews’ bones in these cases.

We left Otranto and drove to the coast, where we had another large lunch, this time at the Masseria Panareo, following which the three men along with our guide Ido hiked up to an abandoned lookout at the edge of the sea on a bluff.  This was part of a string of watchtowers along the coast erected by the Spanish in the 15^th c.:

  

We drove back to Lecce in time for a guided tour run by the local tourist office.  We thought we had signed up for a tour of the Lecce synagogue, but it no longer exists, or, rather, is now a nightclub/restaurant and just about all traces of the synagogue are gone.  We sat in the basement of the structure while the guide told us about it.  Then, we embarked on a tour of Lecce which we did not realize we had signed up for.  We walked the town and admired the Roman amphitheater which had been discovered during some construction:

  

We ended at a remarkable private museum.  The story is amazing, but not out of the ordinary here!  A local man wanted to open a restaurant, but he had some problems with the drainpipe to his toilet.  As he dug to find the leak, he came upon an absolute treasure, multiple rooms and layers of history dating all the way back to the Messapii in the 8^th c. BCE.  His story is documented in an article in the NYTimes from this past spring:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/world/europe/centuries-of-italian-history-are-unearthed-in-quest-to-fix-toilet.html

The really fine artifacts were taken by the government, but there’s lots still here.  In one case is a broken menorah of unknown age:

Tomorrow, Gallipoli—the Italian one, not the Turkish one.  A Gallipoli I never knew existed!

Alberobello and Olives

Monday, October 26, 2015

We left beautiful Matera and began the drive to Alberobello, another UNESCO World Heritage Site, back in Apulia.  Along the way we began to see a number of trulli:

  

Alberobello is a village made completely of trulli, limestone buildings with mortarless roofs in a cone or dome shape.  The roof slabs are layered and held together by a keystone, and the walls are mostly whitewashed.

  

Looking at the roofs, it’s hard to imagine that they would keep the structure dry in a wind-whipped rainstorm, but apparently they do.

Today most of the buildings have been turned into tourist shops, and we spent a pleasant hour plus walking the town and visiting the shops.  We then drove through the countryside and passed vast olive farms where the harvest is in progress.  We arrived at the Masseria Lo Spagnulo near Ostuni, where we are to have lunch and then take a walk:

This turned out to be somewhat sad.  The masseria must have been truly lovely once, but it is now somewhat rundown, in poor repair, and the accommodations have been taken over as an encampment for refugees.  There are a number of men (we saw no women) simply hanging out here as a safe place.  They have no work, a tiny income from the Italian government which subsidizes their lives, and their futures are very unclear.  In addition, the vast olive groves which belong to the farm are not being managed or harvested.  That seemed to us to be a disconnect—if there are able-bodied men here who have no work and there are olive groves to be harvested, well…..

We had a very mediocre lunch adjacent to some historic olive presses, and then the three men took a walk with Ido while the women stayed behind:

  

From a rise over some railroad tracks the enormity of the fields was visible:

  

The trees are very old, perhaps 1000 years, and the trunks make fantastic shapes:

Also on the grounds is a 90% completed resort.  It never was finished, and is now abandoned and falling into disrepair.

The remainder of our walk (and some time after) was filled with our fantastic plans to buy and finish the place.  We had great ideas, let by our entrepreneur Peter, and had much fun telling our wives of our plans upon our return.

In the late afternoon we drove to Lecce where we checked into our lovely hotel, a restored palace.  More tomorrow.

Matera

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Our hotel, the Palazzo Gattini, was formed by connecting a number of the small cliff-side homes in the center of town, and it was lovely.  We had a particularly nice room with a patio and a pool:

We began our day with a guided walk through the hillside town which dates back to Neolithic days.  Some of the caves were natural and some of the homes were dug into the soft rock.  The views were spectacular:

The town sits on one side of a very deep narrow valley:

You can go down the side of the valley to the floor, ford the stream, and climb up the other side. We did not do this, but in this photo you can see the switchback trail on the other side of the valley:

From the city side of the valley you could see the caves on the opposite side:

There is a museum of sorts, showing how the 15,000 occupants of the city lived in the caves along with their animals into the mid-20^th c.:

  

Sanitation was poor, living conditions were primitive, but the city was fully occupied until in 1952 the Italian government deemed the city unfit for human habitation in such numbers and in such a lifestyle.  The city was evacuated with government reimbursement for the people.  In the 1980’s rehabilitation of the living units was begun, and people began moving back in.  The current population of the old city is 3000.  The city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, and will be the 2019 European Cultural Capital.  It’s interesting that the area is quite reminiscent of Cappadocia in Turkey, and indeed, it had Byzantine monks settle here and form a monastery in 1952.

After the walking tour we needed some refreshment, and, although I’ve not mentioned gelato as often as we ate it, once again we found delicious Italian ice cream.  This served as our lunch as we anticipated a large dinner tonight.  Do we look guilty?

In the late afternoon we were driven to the other side of the valley where we began a walk along the edge of the heights overlooking the valley:

The views of the city across the valley were wonderful:

There are caves here with frescos of unknown age:

We went back to the hotel, washed up, and we began dinner at a wonderful local restaurant at 8:00.  We finished, after innumerable courses and much wine, close to 11:00.  I cannot imagine the calorie count.