Left to right: produce from Masseria Trapanà’s gardens; the narrow streets of Lecce. Opposite, clockwise from top left: the Roman <strong>amp</strong>hitheatre; 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 <strong>Travel</strong> 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. <strong>Travel</strong> 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.<strong>com</strong> 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 r<strong>amp</strong>arts were raised higher as huge armies passed through the fields, demanding food and water. Robust trade with sailors from the East Indies and <strong>Arabia</strong> 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 <strong>amp</strong>hitheatre, built by Hadrian in the 2nd century AD as a divertissement for the locals. Over a cup of caffè con ghiaccio con latte di 60 FOOD & TRAVEL ARABIA
GOURMET TRAVELLER LECCE FOOD & TRAVEL ARABIA 61