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.