Southern Italy Part 1: Lecce

Hi all,

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get this post up, this week has been really busy with class work, I’ve hardly had a chance to catch my breath. But, the post is up now and, fingers crossed, the next installment should be up sometime tomorrow evening. There’s a lot to talk about this week, so I’ll just jump right in here. Let me just start by saying that because it was a busy weekend and I don’t want this blog post to go on forever (plus it’s a really slow week here, in the classroom all week), I’m going to do the write up about this weekend in installments over the next couple of days. Now, on to southern Italy! This weekend, I went with Dane, Natalie, and Audrey to southern Italy, to the towns of Lecce and Brindisi, in the “heel of the boot” that is Italy.

Because Venice is in the very northern part of Italy, about as far from Lecce, the first city we went to, as you could get, we took an overnight train to save time. The journey took twelve hours. We left about nine o’clock on Thursday night from Venice and arrived in Lecce at just after nine the next morning. We opted not to get beds on the train because it was so much cheaper to just get a seat, but this was not the most comfortable choice, though still better than an airplane. It was interesting because there were only four of us traveling together and the compartment, which looked just like the ones in the Harry Potter movies, was for six people, so there were two strangers in the compartment with us. They seemed pretty nice, but because they did not seem to speak English, and our Italian isn’t that good, we really didn’t talk to them much. It was kind of a long night, partly because the conductor came in at 3:30 in the morning to check our tickets. However, waking up to the sight of fields of olive trees on one side and the ocean on the other side definitely made up for it. Plus, the weather was beautiful, sunny and warm enough for a t-shirt, we couldn’t have asked for better.

We didn’t have a particular plan in mind when we got off of the train, so Dane and Audrey bought a map from the store in the train station and we saw that the center of town had the Roman theater and the famous column we had heard about, so we headed in that direction. On the way we came across a gelateria (a shop where you buy gelato) where you could get three scoops for only one euro and fifty cents, which is a great deal, since usually in Venice one scoop is one euro and twenty cents. So, naturally, we all got some gelato, which was excellent. Something fun, outside the store was a machine like the ones you can get bouncy balls or candy out of. However, instead of any of the normal things, it had full-size Rubix cubes in it! Then, on the other side of the door was another machine with little Rubix cubes in it. It was pretty cool.

Gelato in hand, we continued on up the street and went into what apparently is the main church in Lecce, the Duomo di Lecce. It was very pretty on the inside, it had beautiful stained glass windows all around it, which is actually something that seems to be somewhat rarer in Italy than it is in the US. In Venice, especially, churches very rarely have any stained glass, so the windows in the Duomo in Lecce were a pleasant surprise.

After leaving the church, we headed up the main road which led directly into the city center. In the center of the city were the ruins of an ancient Roman theater, which were spectacular. It was awesome, too, because the ruins were just in the center of town, right in the middle of the more modern buildings, like they were no big deal. Next to the ruins was one of the massive columns that originally marked the end of the Appian Way in Brindisi. The Appian Way was an ancient Roman road that ran from Brindisi to Rome, way back when, and was one of the most important roads of its time (once again, thank you Wikipedia!). The two columns used to mark the beginning, or end, of the road in Brindisi, however, after one of the columns was struck by lightning and fell over, it was left to lay for about a century, until the people of Lecce claimed it and re-erected it in their own city. So now, the second column is in Lecce, while its original pedestal, as well as the first column, still stand in Brindisi. We saw both, but I’ll talk more about that when I get to Brindisi in a day or two. The column was definitely cool, though, it was huge, and made of this really pretty blue and white marble. There were also iron bands around it, presumably to keep it together.

We stayed on the square, just hanging out and enjoying the nice weather for quite awhile, partly because Dane was going to different banks trying to cash his traveler’s checks, which apparently was quite an ordeal. However, it left Audrey, Natalie, and me with plenty of time to just relax and enjoy Lecce. We went into a bookstore across the square from the theater. It was pretty neat, I saw the Harry Potter series in Italian. The entire book store was cool, there was even a small section at the front that had books in English, French, and Spanish as well. It was definitely weird, though, to see the names of American authors like Stephen King and Dan Brown on the covers of books with Italian titles because they were translations. Lecce was full of bookstores, too, there was literally at least one on every street, and sometimes two. This was fine by me, of course, because I love bookstores. And it was just cool to go into these stores and see the Italian versions of some of my favorite books.

After leaving the square, we just wandered down a few streets and came out near a small street sale that was going on. There were tents set up along this street, selling clothes, purses, CDs, DVDs, and books. We went to one stand that was selling all sorts of CDs, DVDs, and books and I actually ended up finding Italian versions of some of the Baby-sitters Club books (Il Club delle baby-sitter), so, naturally, I bought one, “Kristy e la festa della mamma,” which, after looking it up on Amazon, means, “Kristy and the Mother’s Day Surprise”, but which literally translates to “Kristy and the festivity of the mother.” What I especially enjoyed was bargaining with the man who ran the stand until I ended up getting the book for half price, which is definitely something you can’t usually do in the US.

We had lunch in a panini shop that was basically the Italian equivalent of Subway, but better because the bread was better, it was very crunchy and just had more flavor. Then, we walked through a beautiful park with palm trees where we would normally have oak trees and over to another church, Santa Croce, which had a crazy awesome façade, covered in statues including one of a dragon and one of a phoenix, it really looked like a wedding cake. On the way over there, too, we passed by an elementary school, where some kids yelled out of the window at us. I couldn’t tell if they were being friendly or mean, but we waved back anyway and said “Ciao!”
On the way back to the train station to catch our train to Brindisi, where our hostel for the night was, we stopped in for a bit at the archaeological museum, which apparently must be pretty new because half of the exhibits weren’t set up yet. There were masterpiece paintings in there just sitting on the floor and leaning up against the wall. It was a bit strange, but the place was still pretty cool, there were some really awesome ancient pieces of pottery, like water jugs and bowls, plus a few old instruments like lyres.

After the archaeological museum it was time to hop on our train and head to Brindisi, the next stop on our trip. And that it what I will talk about hopefully tomorrow, since this post is plenty long enough.

Ciao,
Maria : )