Food_amp_amp_Travel_Arabia_Vol3_I7_I8_2016_vk_com_ENGLISHMAGAZINES

Left to right: produce
from Masseria
Trapanà’s gardens;
the narrow streets
of Lecce. Opposite,
clockwise from top
left: the Roman
amphitheatre; a
pasticciotto pastry;
strolling through the
city’s shops; grape
made with local
grapes; buildings
in straw-coloured
stone; pasticciottoflavoured
ice cream;
aged buildings;
shops boast
fresh produce;
narrow streets
‘The cuisine in Lecce couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to its Spanish architecture,
with a purity of flavour and simplicity of form that often veer into the emotional’
After darkness falls in Lecce, the streets are eerily muted.
Taking an after-dinner constitutional, well-fed and welllubricated
with grape, you tend to happen across sites that
shock you out of your postprandial fugue with prepossessing
beauty. The Basilica di Santa Croce is one such landmark – a
hallucinatory vision that would sit easily alongside the works of
Hieronymus Bosch or Brueghel the Younger, swarming with details
that rivet the attention and beguile the mind – a delirium of cherubs
and caryatids, dogs and dragons, fruit and flora, goats and
gargoyles, saints and satyrs. It’s a whirlwind of the sublunary and
the sublime. It’s mesmerising. It’s a true assault on the senses.
The church is carved from the ubiquitous Pietra Leccese, a local
honey-hued stone known for its malleability. When it sets and
Travel information
Lecce is the capital of the province of Lecce in Italy’s Puglia region.
Currency is the euro, and the time is one hour ahead of GMT. The
average high temperature in July is 32C and the average low is 21C.
Travel time is 8 hours 50 minutes from Dubai – Salento Airport, which is
approximately 40 minutes from Lecce by car.
GETTING THERE
Emirates flies daily from Dubai to Brindisi via Rome emirates.com
RESOURCES
Puglia Promozione is the region’s tourist board and has information on
the country’s history, culture and geography. viaggiareinpuglia.it
FURTHER READING
Puglia: A Culinary Memoir by Maria Pignatelli Ferrante (Oronzo Editions,
$28) beautifully discusses the region, the people and its food.
CARBON COUNTING
To offset your carbon emissions when visiting Lecce, make a donation
at climatecare.org and support environmental projects around the world.
Return flights from Dubia to Brindisi produce 1.06 tonnes C0 2 , meaning
a cost to offset of $10.92.
hardens, it accrues a sodium-vapour yellow patina. The facade was
carved from 1549 to 1695, when the city was the capital of the
Puglian region under the reign of the Holy Roman Empire. Arguably
more than any of the many other cultures that have occupied
Lecce, it left the most dramatic architectural imprint: the baroque.
The cuisine in Lecce and the Salento peninsula couldn’t be more
diametrically opposed to its Spanish architecture, with a purity of
flavour and simplicity of form that often veer into the emotional. Yet,
like the Pietra Leccese, it was moulded by the many cultures it
came into contact with.
Salento is the stiletto heel of the Italian boot and the southernmost
reach of greater Puglia, jutting between the Ionian and Adriatic
seas. Largely flat and tremendously fertile, it has been a prized
possession throughout history, occupied (or destroyed) by the
Messapians, Romans, Ostrogoths, Saracens, Lombards,
Hungarians, Slavs, Normans and Spaniards. But never tourists.
The ramparts were raised higher as huge armies passed through
the fields, demanding food and water. Robust trade with sailors
from the East Indies and Arabia brought in exotic foreign exports
such as coffee, tomatoes, chickpeas and red aubergines, which
sprouted vigorously and were readily adopted by farming families.
Over 3,000 years a dichotomy grew between the cuisines of the
peasant and ruling classes. The former, largely vegetarian as they
weren’t afforded the luxury of meat, learned to make do with what
they had, finding clever uses for pulses, beans and brassicas, not
to mention the Mediterranean melange of wheat, olive oil and grape.
Their cookery eventually took the name cucina povera (the food
of the poor), which could more effectively be explained as making
use of limited ingredients in ingenious ways, wasting little food in the
kitchen, if any at all.
Nobody knows more about this than Silvestro Silvestori, a native
Leccese who, after spending years in northern Italy and the United
States, returned to Salento to open The Awaiting Table – a cooking
school underpinned by his rigorous academic study of local
language and culture. We meet at the Piazza Sant’Oronzo
in the centre of the city, in between the Column of Sant’Oronzo (the
patron saint of Lecce) and the Roman amphitheatre, built by Hadrian
in the 2nd century AD as a divertissement for the locals.
Over a cup of caffè con ghiaccio con latte di
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FOOD & TRAVEL ARABIA