William Gray visits some of Italy's most intriguing ancient towns
Before I visited Puglia you could have dropped a Romanesque architrave on my head and I would have been none the wiser about classical architecture. Don’t get me wrong. I know a nice-looking church when I see one. It’s just that Puglia has lots of nice-looking churches – and a great deal more besides.
Tucked into the heel of Italy, this little-visited province may not have the cultural clout of Venice, Rome or Florence, but what it lacks in notoriety, it more than compensates for with a bewildering range of monuments – from neolithic tombs to Gothic cathedrals.
You can understand my trepidation then, while browsing through a guidebook on Puglia’s historical hotspots I came across such perplexing descriptions as ‘octagonal piers on zoomorphic supports’ and ‘trefoil matroneum with a triple apse.’
However, driving south from the Adriatic port of Bari, I soon discovered that technical terminology was the least of my concerns. Leaving the autostrada, only one small town stood between me and Il Deserto – a wheat and olive farm where I would be based for the week.
San Vito dei Normanni looked harmless enough on a map, but it concealed a fiendish one-way system that was presumably devised by a bored town planner with a very long piece of string. It took three attempts to reach the other side, yet the remarkable thing was, that in all my convoluted roaming, not once did I glimpse the town’s 12th century castle.
Puglian towns, I decided, were rather like nuts. All the interesting bits were concealed somewhere in the middle, but you had to crack the outer shell first. Lecce, first on my list of sightseeing targets, was no exception. Calm and ordered until it met the town’s outskirts, the autostrada suddenly unravelled like frayed string – pitching me into multi-laned urban mayhem.
I hadn’t experienced such a rush of adrenaline since rafting the Devil’s Toilet Bowl, a grade four rapid on the Zambezi. All I could do was cling helplessly to the steering wheel, snatching glances at meaningless signposts, while trying to keep pace with the surge of traffic. After some time, I was relieved to be cast into the quiet backwater of a side street where I parked and set off on foot.
By some fluke of navigation, I had wound up on the edge of Lecce’s historic centre. Dubbed the Florence of the baroque, this large town of 100,000 is renowned for its elaborate architecture. I made straight for the church of Santa Croce. Framed by a narrow avenue of town houses adorned with curvaceous wrought-iron balconies, Lecce’s most celebrated building glinted like a seam of exquisite crystals hidden in a canyon.
The imposing façade of the 16th century church was dominated by a large rose window from which spread a minutely detailed and symmetrical design of columns and friezes. Saints, dragons and gargoyles crouched in niches like seabirds on a crowded cliff. The effect was wonderfully effusive – an unrestrained outpouring of creativity that somehow managed to hold back from the brink of gaudiness.
I resisted the urge to consult my guidebook. Cumbersome architectural terms would have shackled Santa Croce like scaffolding. Instead, I wandered through the town’s old quarter, perfectly content as a layman of all-things-baroque. Two things struck me about this ebullient style that flourished from the 16th to 18th centuries. Firstly, the finely carved honey-toned sandstone had resisted weathering remarkably well and, secondly, it wasn’t limited solely to churches. Many houses oozed barocco Leccese – from their elegant balconies to sculptured doorways.
By contrast, Piazza Sant’Oronzo was largely surrounded by modern buildings. I was about to cock a baroquian snook at the pigeon-strewn square when something caught my eye. Partly excavated in one corner was a Roman amphitheatre – a semicircle of tiered seats and a few crumbling pillars.
It was impressive enough that something built in the 2nd century AD should still see the light of day in a busy town centre, but what really intrigued me was the ruin’s close proximity to a McDonald’s burger bar. Here, in blatant juxtaposition, were two extremes of Puglian architecture – both social icons of their time, yet effortlessly bridging centuries of change. It took less than a minute to walk from one to the other – a kind of time warp that filled me with a sudden urge to trace the missing years.
I opened my guidebook, then almost wished I hadn’t. The historical background for Lecce read, ‘A Messapian settlement, afterwards a Greek town and the Roman Lupiae, Lecce is the 10C Licea and the Litium of the Swabian epoch.’ Clearly the place was steeped in history, but rather than wading through more rhetoric I decided to embark on a little archaeological quest of my own.
Humans inhabited Italy at least 200,000 years ago, but there is scant evidence for settlement until around 5,000 BC when neolithic farmers began leaving their mark. The following day, driving south of Lecce, I managed to track down one of the few monuments dating from this early age.
Half concealed by orange netting that had been spread beneath a grove of olive trees prior to harvest, the Dolmen di Scusi consisted of a large slab of limestone raised off the ground on smaller pedestals of rock. I couldn’t help but feel a slight pang of disappointment. In my imagination, megalithic tombs had always seemed much grander affairs. It wasn’t as if I was expecting Stonehenge, but I certainly hadn’t counted on the goat droppings or the distinctly post-Neolithic chalk graffiti.
Only later, while heading towards the coast, did it dawn on me how fundamental an achievement the dolmen was. To witness such primitive building blocks was one thing, but to envisage the quantum leap in thought and technology that, even thousands of years later, would produce something like the church of Santa Croce was quite another. I arrived in Otranto, an ancient town overlooking the Adriatic, keen to find more clues to Puglia’s distinguished past.
Pleasure boats and fishing trawlers formed orderly rows across the turquoise shallows of Otranto’s harbour where, 3,500 years ago, Mycenaean traders beached their ships. These Bronze Age forays were a precursor to the first Greek colonies in Italy. Otranto, known then as Hydruntum, was one of the most important, but there are few, if any, signs of this original Hellenic settlement.
Roman remains are equally scarce, limited to a floor mosaic concealed beneath a magnificent Norman biblical design in the cathedral. In fact, the nearest I got to anything Roman in Otranto were the steps leading down to the beach. They were made of concrete – popularised by the Romans around 200 BC. However, the old part of town (enclosed by 15th century fortifications) contained an antiquated gem dating from the next major episode in Puglian history – Byzantine rule.
The church of San Pietro nestled in a stone-paved square surrounded by whitewashed houses blushed pink by trailing hydrangeas. The square seemed deserted, but no sooner had I begun perusing the pitted ochre-grey walls of the 10th century church, than an elderly man materialised from a nearby house. Squinting against the dazzling sunshine, he shuffled towards the church door, fumbled with some keys, then beckoned me inside.
Slouching into a chair, the caretaker gave a vague sweep of his arm as if to say, “Well, here it is,” then promptly fell asleep. Just as I was about to assail the unfortunate man with phrasebook Italian, I realised that it was still siesta time, so I mumbled “Grazie” and turned instead to my guidebook. There was the usual salvo of ‘blind arcades’, ‘cylindrical cupola’ and ‘barrel-vaulted ceilings’, but I managed to dodge my way to the left-hand nave which was adorned with some especially fine Byzantine frescoes.
San Pietro’s role as cathedral ended when Otranto fell to the Normans. The great church-builders set about building the town’s imposing Santa Maria Annunziata in 1080. Four centuries later, another invasion rocked the city – this time by Turks. It was a savage attack. Only 800 inhabitants survived the initial onslaught, but they too were executed when they refused to renounce their Christian faith.
Leaving Otranto, I climbed towards Minerva Hill where the massacre took place. The road continued south, weaving through a forbidding landscape of shattered limestone hills studded with prickly pear. Clear days promised views of the Albanian mountains 96km away across the Adriatic, but the heat haze had muddled the horizon. Even the medieval watch towers perched on the Italian shore seemed to waver on their karstic headlands as the afternoon heat sapped the clarity from the air.
Not surprisingly, the limestone heel of Italy, also known as the Salentine Peninsula, is riddled with caves. Some that I drove past, like Grotta Romanelli, have yielded stylised paintings made by humans 12,000 years ago. It seemed that just when I was beginning to grasp something of the complexity of Puglia’s history, I would encounter a completely new and unforeseen chapter.
There was one part of the region, however, that would not fail to surprise even the most ardent historian or titillate the most assiduous architect. It somehow managed to combine everything ornate and noble about classical Italy with a wonderfully quirky, almost fanciful, rural scene. I was about to visit the land of the trulli (circular houses).
Setting off early the following morning, I drove west from San Vito dei Normanni. Almost immediately, I began to see them – tiny, conical-roofed houses sprouting from orderly vineyards like clusters of stone toadstools. The trulli were made entirely of local limestone, each circular dwelling no larger than a garden gazebo. Some were whitewashed and daubed with strange folk symbols. They had few, if any, windows and just a single wooden door.
I pushed on towards Alberobello where a large swathe of the town was completely pimpled with trulli – over 1,000 of them stacked up on a slope like old-fashioned sugar pots. Inevitably, tourists arrive in their droves to witness the sight and locals have responded with offerings of miniature plastic trulli and other slightly twee trinkets that only hint at rural craft traditions.
Nevertheless, Alberobello was a fascinating place for an amble. It was a sign of the largely unspoiled nature of Puglia that something as ancient and diminutive as trulli could still dominate a landscape. The same, I felt, was true of many hilltop towns that crown the region’s central plateau, known as the Murge. Approaching nearby Locorotondo, a Gothic church rose supreme above the town’s skyline.
This beautiful town, with its immaculate stone-flagged lanes and elegant houses, commanded sweeping views across the Itria Valley – dotted with trulli and scrawled with the rich terracotta of freshly ploughed soil. In the distance, on another lofty outcrop, stood Martina Franca, a bastion of baroque and rococo architecture.
Puglia had grown on me. It wasn’t one of the chic cultural centres of Italy; nor could it rival the scenery of, say, Tuscany or the Amalfi Coast. No visitor, though, should ever feel ‘down at heel’ in this remote and strangely enigmatic province. As I drove north, joining the autostrada to Naples for my flight home, I couldn’t resist one final excursion to sample Puglia’s diverse heritage.
My initial stony dread of historical architecture had softened over the past week and I happened to have read in my guidebook that the coastal town of Trani had a particularly fine cathedral. Founded in the late 11th century, San Nicola Pellegrino presided over a bustling harbour of blue-hulled fishing boats. The cathedral’s tower (or should I say campanile?) was tall, yet immaculately proportioned, while the façade was lavishly adorned with sculptures and carvings. A fine Romanesque architrave if ever I saw one.
When to go: To best enjoy exploring the towns and cities of this beautiful region you should head to Puglia in late spring or early autumn, when the heat is less intense and there are fewer crowds. During the summer, however, Martina Franca, an elegant 18th century town near Alberobello, hosts the Festival of the Itria Valley, a mixture of concerts and street theatre. This takes place in late July/early August. If the heat gets too much during this time of year, Puglia has plenty of excellent beaches on which to cool off, and coastal areas which benefit from a cooling sea breeze.
