To Turin

Tuesday September 13th

Goodness, what a long day. I am quite exhausted, though I have done nothing but sit all day. And now my internet connection is so poor I can't post any photos. They'll have to come later, when I've got a decent connection.

We were up at 6 and in a coach by 7.30, leaving Vieste.



This is our last view of the little harbour, taken through the bus window

We were driven back along the Gargano Peninsula, enjoying further spectacular views.




Then we drove across the plain to Foggia, which took two hours. Then we had an hour's wait for the train to Milan, which I have to say was exactly on time, and delivered us to Milan station exactly on time, 7 long hours later.

We had a 40 minute wait in Milan station for the train to Turin. Milan station is rather monumental looking, though the impression is somewhat impaired by the large screens all over the place.




We had a one hour journey to Turin, followed by a short walk to our hotel. We were at the hotel by about 7.45, having had a journey of just over 12 hours. I was almost too tired to eat my dinner, and left the table before coffee and tea, otherwise I might have had to put my head on the table and sleep.


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Peschici

Monday 12th September

A boat trip around the grotto-ridden coastline was planned for this morning, and we hurried our breakfast and walked down to the harbour and around it to the boat. But Paul did not care for the look of the boat, which was an open boat with wooden benches on the deck. It was already crammed with people and I had the feeling I would be squashed in like a refugee. We were assured there were life jackets, but Paul was doubtful about the expedition. It was a very sunny day (for once) and he had the feeling he would either be fried or drowned. And I'm not a great fan of sea caves - neither is he for that matter, having gone into the Blue Grotto in Capri and not really enjoyed it. It least it wasn't an open rowing boat, like the one on Capri, but he had memories of having to lie flat in the boat to get into the grotto, and didn't fancy repeating it. So we left.

We decided instead to take the bus to Peschici which is supposed to be a very attractive small town about 30 minutes drive away. It was some time until the bus, so we stayed in the cool hotel, and left later, going through one of the local markets which was full of very attractive produce.




It was hard to resist buying something. As well as the wonderful fruit, there was a huge selection of cheeses, and I've never seen so many varieties of pasta in my life.

We found what appeared to be the bus station but it turned out not to be, and we had to return to the hotel for further directions before setting off again. We finally found the bus station and bought the necessary tickets just in time. The bus left at a time which bore no relation either to the printed timetable book or to the timetable displayed in the bar which also sold the tickets, but we got in and were off.

The journey was slightly less hair-raising than the coach drive to Vieste, though there were many hairpin bends, but at least we weren't travelling along steep cliffs leading down to the sea. We drove between acres of olive fields




Though sometimes these gave way to the wilder forests of the national park.

When we reached Peschici, we were dismayed to find the bus stopped well outside the town, and we had a 15 minute walk to get to the centre. It was quite steeply downhill, so I didn't look forward to our return.

Peschici is a little smaller than Vieste, and is perched on top of a rocky vantage point above a beautiful sandy bay. The houses are piled on top of one another in a jumble, which makes the streets hard to navigate.




It was built in AD971 as a defence against the Saracens, and there are remains from that time.




This is the entranced to the walled centre of the town. The historic centre is full of a labyrinth of narrow streets, normally full of shops and restaurants; but today, everything was shut.



The streets were steep and the wider ones were paved with marble slabs, though the narrow ones were ankle-turning cobbles.

We had hoped to be able to see the 10th century castle, but it was shut too. After stumbling over the cobbles for a long time, and navigating some very steep stairs, we came out on the road above the lovely bay.



As you can see, we were still a considerable distance above the beach. We continued walking, hoping to find a way down, but we were so far above the beach that, in the end, we just contented ourselves with the lovely views.




This was the charming little harbour. As you can see, there were sets of steps going down, but many of them led to private houses and it wasn't possible to tell except by going down. And if it was somebody's house, you would have to come all the way up again.

We clambered up and down for well over an hour, and never managed to get down to the beach. Eventually, we settled for going back to the modern town for something to eat and drink, and to go back to the bus stop. Once again, the bus arrived at a time that was not advertised, and we went back to Vieste to collapse onto our beds in a state of exhaustion.

This is the last real day of our holiday, the rest is travel towards home. Tomorrow we have to be up by 6 as we are being driven to Foggia to catch a train. It appears we will spend 10 hours in trains and end up in Turin - as long as there isn't flooding on the line!

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Vieste

Sunday 11th September

My connection is so poor at present I am having difficulty posting even text, so it may take a while for any photos to appear here. Writing this after midnight seems to help - then I'm not competing for bandwidth with every single other person in the hotel.

As we had no excursions today, we did not wake early and didn't appear at breakfast until 9 - a great luxury. It was pouring with rain outside, so there was no reason to get up early anyway. After the unfortunate dinner last night, it was a surprise to find that breakfast was excellent, with a huge range of things including 2 types of focaccia and little squares of omelette with asparagus or tomato, as well as the usual eggs. And the pastries were excellent as well, as was the coffee, which was a welcome surprise after we had been served cups of mud after dinner the previous night.

The skies cleared after breakfast, so we went out to explore the town, making for the historic centre. The town is at the very edge if the Gargano Peninsula, and is surrounded by water. In medieval times, it was frequently attacked by pirates, so it was walled, and many of the walls still exist, except where the buildings were on top of steep cliffs.




As space is limited, the houses are all piled up together in a jumbled mass. The centre is a jumble of fascinating little alleyways with overhanging balconies.



We visited the shell museum, which was both fascinating and informative and wandered through the narrow streets. I've so far resisted buying anything, though there is a lot of jewellery and some very good ceramics, all housed in attractive old buildings.



The streets are all paved with marble, which becomes very slippery in the rain, so walking about can be quite hazardous if it's wet - which is frequently was today. We were fortunate that, shortly after we went out to explore, the sun came out and then I needed my hat and sunglasses.

After we had wandered all over the historic part, we went looking for a lunch time sandwich is the modern Main Street, which is lined with cafés and restaurants.



We sat under an awning to eat, as it was quite hot by then. However, once we had eaten, the rain started again, and soon it was hammering down once more. The canvas of the awning where we were sitting was not entirely water resistant, so after a while, we began to get wet. We put up our umbrellas and one of our group took a photo of us sitting with umbrellas up under the awning which he says is illustrative of exactly what the holiday has been like. He said it was hard to take a photo because the rain was so heavy! What he couldn't photograph was the fact that we even had to move our feet because of the depth of water running down the road or we would have been ankle deep in water again.

Once the rain had slackened off we went back to the hotel to find some dry clothes.

We ate in a local restaurant this evening, which made a change from the hotel. It also meant 4 courses - antipasti, pasta course, main course, dessert. There will have to be a lot of dieting when we get home!


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To Vieste

Saturday September 10th
I cannot really describe today as a good day, in many ways it went from bad to worse. And the network connection where I am now is very slow, so I don't know if I can ever post any of the few photos I have taken.

Apparently it rained extremely heavily last night, with the result that no trains ran in this whole area today, because of flooding on the line. It all sounds horribly familiar.

A coach collected us from our hotel at 10am and drove us to the station to catch our train. It dropped us 100 yards or so from the station as the traffic was awful and we walked to the station to find it completely crammed with people all gesticulating and shouting and no trains at all.

Fortunately, we have a tour manager and he managed to hire us another coach at vast cost - €1500. But because of bad traffic, flooding etc, the said coach was very late so we waited for 3 hours in the station. There was no waiting room, so we sat in the café, but soon were asked to leave as the seats were for patrons of the café - not unreasonably. Paul and I solved this problem by buying things from the café and then taking a long while to eat and drink them, so we had seats for most of the three hours.

Eventually, the coach arrived, but not before the rain had started hammering down again. The coach came as close to the station as the mad traffic would permit, and we waded out to it. Paul and I must have been more fortunate than most because our cases didn't get too wet - possibly because we had purchased huge umbrellas in Lecce. People with small British umbrellas got very wet, and some people's cases were soaking and they had to unpack and try to dry their clothes once they arrived.

Heaven knows how the poor driver managed, because visibility was very poor, but he drove us through flooded olive groves and flooded fields and down flooded roads to Bari, where we had to change coach. The coach which had been supposed to meet us at Foggia station met us at a service station north of Bari instead, and we changed from one coach to another. Fortunately, it had stopped raining by then.

We drove through a flat area of salt pans and market gardens, most of which were flooded.







Eventually, we reached the Gargano Peninsula and then the road turned into a switchback full of hairpin bends. We wound our way through forests high above the sea, with superb views from time to time through the thick forest. I took some good views.






You can see how high up we were - and how threatening the sky looks!

Part of the peninsula is a national park, and there are some spectacularly pretty parts.







We arrived at the hotel eventually, after more than 5 hours in the bus, and found our rooms.

Dinner did not go well. The hotel was very full and there was not enough food for the buffet of antipasti. We had been given a choice of turkey or vegetables for our main course, so I had chosen vegetables. The antipasti was a variety of grilled cold vegetables. The first course was vegetable pasta. Then I had my main course of vegetables. Strangely enough, the pudding was tiramisu. I wouldn't have been much surprised if it had been some sort of vegetables!

Our boat trip for tomorrow has been cancelled, as the weather is too rough. Our tour manager had planned to take us instead on the public bus to a local beauty spot, but tomorrow is Sunday so there are no buses. So he suggested going to the beach on the hotel shuttle bus. But the hotel shuttle bus has come to the end of its summer contract. Anyway, the weather forecast tomorrow is for thunderstorms and heavy rain. It's probably just as well we have plenty of books on our kindles!


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Galatina and Gallipoli

Friday September 9th
We made a not too early start today and went to Galatina to see a famous church there, the church of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a rare survival in the Gothic style. It was built between 1384 and 1391, but what is so remarkable about it is the frescos inside.




This is not my photo, it comes from the Internet - my photos are nothing like as good as this!

A number of artists of the school of Giotto decorated the church with a cycle of seventeen subjects, including scenes of the Apocalypse, Noah’s Ark, Genesis, the life of Jesus, the four evangelists, the life of Mary and also scenes of life Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

This shows the detail of some of the frescos.




These are scenes from the life of Christ. You might recognise the flight into Egypt at the top of the arch.

The only other frescoed church I've ever seen in the least like this is the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and this one doesn't equal it and unfortunately it isn't so well preserved, but it's still quite stunning. The date is a little later of course, though still mainly 14th century. There are some later frescos; one we saw was dated 1425, and there were some from a century later.

I'm not sure of the date of the ones below




The fresco shows St Catherine herself and on her right is an Annunciation. It was hard to get far enough away from it to get a photo of all of it, as there are pillars in the way.

We paid a quick visit to the Diocesan Museum where there is a charming cloister (it used to be a convent) decorated with 16th century frescos.



The museum itself houses Franciscan choir stalls and a large collection of reliquaries.

We visited a nice coffee shop to get out of the rain, then we were off again in the bus to Gallipoli, a town on the west side of the heel of Italy's boot.

Gallipoli, like many towns, has a new part and and old town. In this case, the old town sits on a tiny island connected to the mainland by a 17th century bridge. It is almost completely surrounded by defensive walls, built mainly in the 14th century.

The east side is dominated by a robust fortress dating back to the 13th century, but largely rebuilt in the 1500s when the town fell under Angevin control.




These fortifications say a lot about Gallipoli’s history; thanks to its strategic position, it was frequently under siege. Early in its history it was part of Magna Graecia and remained so until it was conquered by the Romans. (People in this south eastern region of Italy still speak a dialect which bears a lot of relation to Ancient Greek. Our guide for the day said his grandmother, who came from England and lived in the area for 3 years, learned the dialect but no Italian)

After the town had been sacked successively by hordes of Vandals and Goths, the Byzantines arrived, rebuilding the old town very much in the form it can be seen today. Normans, Angevins and the Bourbons arrived in successive waves until the Unification of Italy in 1861.

The island centre of Gallipoli is home to numerous impressive Baroque churches and aristocratic palazzi, testament to the town's former wealth as a trading port. It was apparently well known for the export of lamp oil.



This is the cathedral, dedicated to St Agatha. It doesn't have a big square in front of it like most churches because the island had limited space and the population grew so every square metre was used for housing.

There is a positively labyrinthine weave of narrow streets all eventually leading to the sea-front promenade.




What we found surprising about these narrow streets is that cars drive up and down them. Pedestrians hastily jump out of the way when they hear one approaching.

There is a wonderful fish market, which sells that day's catch.




They even cook it for you on the spot. Many of our party lunched there on the fresh fish, but Paul said he had had such a big breakfast that he didn't need any lunch, so we did without.

After shopping and wandering, we went back to the bus and set off back to Lecce. We are off to Vieste tomorrow, though fortunately not with a very early start.


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Alberobello

Afternoon of Thursday September 8th

I was so exhausted last night I was completely unable to do anything after dinner except go to sleep, so only managed to write up the first half of yesterday's visit. We climbed up and down so many flights of stairs and walked up and down so many hills I was completely finished!

After we had paid out brief visit to Matera, we had a quick lunch and got back on the bus to drive to Alberobello. This town is famous for the Trulli, little round buildings with steep conical roofs like witches hats. You will see the odd Trullo dotted all around this area, but Alberobello has 1500 of them. They are quickly built of the local stone without using mortar - a sort of house made out of drystone walls. The story is that the local landowners forced the peasants to live in them so that, when the tax collectors came, the houses could be quickly disassembled so the landlord was not assessed for as much as he might have been had there been more houses. The Trulli could be quickly built again after the tax collector had left.

This is a whole street of them - now mostly souvenir shops.




Some of them have rather strange symbols painted on the roofs, for good luck, apparently.




Some of the ones above are still being used as homes, others have been converted into hotels or bed and breakfasts. In order to enlarge them, all you did was make a hole in one part of the wall and then build on another one.

Many of them are so smart and plastered inside it is hard to see how they were originally built, but I did find one with a less smart interior.




You have to try and ignore the rather strange things being sold in this shop, and just look at the stones in the roof.

Sometimes there were little gardens between the Trulli.




If this hasn't posted too small, you may notice something green fixed on the trunk of the old tree. It's actually an old water pump. Presumably there would have been a cistern below. No extra water was needed on the afternoon we were there - the rain started coming down in torrents just after I took this photo!

It is also possible to build Trulli of more than one storey, as shown by the Trulli church.




I suspect, however, that more traditional building methods were used for the walls, and only the Trulli style for the roofs.

We were fortunate that there wasn't too much rain until the very end of our visit to Alberobello, but we got very wet indeed while waiting for the shuttle bus to take us back to the car park where the coaches have to be left. I got very cold and the resulting tiredness from all the stairs and hills in Matera and then the hills and the heavy rain in Alberobello and the two long coach trips meant I was too tired to finish this post last night!

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Matera and Alberobello

Thursday September 8th
I'm almost too tired to write this, it has been such a long day. We had to be up at 6 as the bus arrived to take us to Matera at 7. We drove through fields of vines rather than olives this time, and the roads were very narrow. I found it quite terrifying because we were in a big coach which was rather wider than half the road, and we kept meeting lorries which were similarly too wide for the road. Sometimes we passed with only inches to spare.

We were in Matera by 10, and set off to see the sassi, the caves where people lived. These were not natural caves, they were dug out of the soft limestone to provide places to live.

We walked through a modern city of baroque churches and graceful palaces. Then we found ourselves first looking down at the dramatic tangle of grey stone houses; a contrast with the elegance of the new town.




When you walk down a steep staircase, you are amongst this jumble of buildings. Buildings climb up and down the hillside, houses piled on top of each other, the roofs of some acting as streets for those above. They were carved out of the rock and the original caves extended with facades that look like normal homes.

Matera is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in history dating back to the Palaeolithic period. What makes Matera different from other Palaeolithic settlements, though, is that those inhabitants, and their ancestors, never left. Instead, they dug in—quite literally. In the Iron and Bronze Ages, newly-equipped with metal tools, settlers dug underground caverns, cisterns, and tombs in the landscape’s soft volcanic stone (called tufa). Famously, they also dug dwellings.

Those dwellings, and those people, remained throughout the later waves of rulers and empires, from Greeks to Romans to Byzantines. They (and their descendants) are still there today.

On the other side of the ravine from the town you can see the simple forms of the neolithic caves where people lived 7000 years ago.



Things were a bit more modern in later times, but not much. People continued to live in these one-room stone homes, without heat or plumbing, often with donkeys, chickens or other animals sharing the same space.

We visited the Casa Grotta di Vico Solitario, which shows what living there in the 1950s would have been like.

This was the one crowded room



The striped blanket on the right is on top of the bed.

This house had quite a sophisticated kitchen, with two charcoal burners in the stove.


The water came from a cistern below the house. Rainwater from the roofs was stored in underground cisterns and pulled up in a bucket.


The donkey shared the living quarters



A hole in the floor was used to store the manure from the donkey, and this generated heat to heat the house. Don't even think of the smell! There was no bathroom of course - just a pot beside the bed.

Disease was rife. Conditions were so bad that, in 1952, the government of Italy passed a law forcing Matera’s dwellers out of their old quarters and into new, modern buildings. The sassi were left empty and unmaintained. But in 1993, the area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. And as it has become more popular, people have started moving back into the sassi, restoring them and even opening them as luxury hotels or smart restaurants.

There are also many rock cut churches, but I've run out of steam and will have to write more another day. I'm only about half way through the description of today as we went to Alberobello in the afternoon, but I'll have to write about that tomorrow.

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Otranto

Wednesday September 7th

At 9 this morning, a coach came to take us to visit Otranto. It's about 45 kilometres from Lecce, and we drove through miles and miles of olive groves.



The name of Otranto might still be known in Britain for 'The Castle of Otranto', by Horace Walpole, often described as the first true Gothic novel. However, his novel is about a medieval kingdom of his imagination, and the creepy castle he describes bears little resemblance to the rather stolid fortress in the real Otranto.

Like much of the region, Otranto has a colourful and mixed past. It was important as a Greek and then Roman port, called Hydruntum. Later it was ruled by the Byzantines, the Normans and then the Aragonese. In 1480 the town was invaded by Turks, and 800 locals were executed for refusing to convert to Islam. The bones and skulls of the martyrs of Otranto are now stacked behind glass in one of the chapels in the cathedral in a very creepy manner that would have satisfied Walpole's Gothic imagination.

We were dropped beside the very pretty harbour



and we made our way up some steps and into the town through one of the recreated gates. The outer fortifications had been allowed to deteriorate after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and a church was built where the gate had been. The church deteriorated in its turn and was demolished in 1960 and the port gate was re-instated.

From the gate, a very steep little main street runs up to the piazza outside the cathedral.



This is a view over the space outside the gate and the steep little Main Street which I took from the town walls later, but it gives quite a good view of the place, which is really tiny.

The town's most important attraction is the twelfth-century mosaic in the Romanesque cathedral, which was built in 1088.



The facade was partly destroyed when the town was taken back from the Turks in 1481, but was immediately rebuilt in the same style. The rose window is in the Renaissance style though, and the portico, which was added later still, is in the Baroque style.

The famous mosaic, dating to the 12th century is charmingly quaint and on a huge scale, so it fills the whole church.




It is in the Byzantine style, having been carried out by a Byzantine monk called Pantaleone. The church is felt to be a symbol of how the two different strands of Christianity, the Latin Christians and the Byzantine Christians, co-existed peacefully in this place until the 16th century. Pictures within the mosaic include religous stories like Noah's ark, but also depictions of historical, mythical and even pagan figures, including Alexander the Great and King Arthur. Our guide explained all the symbolism to us at great length, otherwise it would have been completely lost on us as it included references to stories common at the time which have now been lost to us. I'd never heard, for instance, about Alexander the Great wanting to travel up to heaven, and putting meat on top of two spears to attract griffons to carry him up there, but the story is in the mosaic!

The real-life 'castle of Otranto', properly called the Castello Aragonese, is a solid construction which forms part of the tough defences of Otranto. The current building is fifteenth-century, though it was built on an earlier one.



The moat was always dry, apparently; you get more injuries, when attacking the walls, if you fall onto the ground than if you fall into the water.

We walked onto the town walls, from which we had fine views of the town and the harbour. Then there was just time for a quick lunch before we were back in the bus and off to the olive mill.

We had a very fascinating talk on olive oil. I had no idea that there were over 60 million olive trees in Italy! We learned how extra virgin olive oil is made and had the process explained to us. The essential fact to know is that no chemicals or additives are used to extract the oil, it is all mechanical, and these days takes about an hour. The mill we visited stores about a quarter of a million litres of olive oil in huge silos



Apparently we have been storing our own olive oil all wrongly. It should be kept out of the sunlight, which is bad for it, and not next to the cooker, as its temperature should be no higher than 24 degrees and no lower than 18 degrees. So we need to go home and move it into a cupboard!

After the talk, which was very interesting, we tasted various different oils. Of course I bought some. Do you need to ask?

After that, the coach took us back to Lecce. We had been very lucky with the weather, we had avoided all the rain, which we saw in the distance. But we had hot sunny weather, and will hope for something similar tomorrow.

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Lecce

Tuesday September 6th

Today was our day for a walking tour of Lecce, and initially we had not been hopeful about the weather. However, it had rained heavily in the night, with lots of thunder and lightning (the latter killing off the hotel's air conditioning) and it was dry by morning, though cloudy. So we hoped for the best, and I took my raincoat. Paul had decided not to bring a raincoat on holiday at all, for reasons best known to himself.

The town of Lecce is more than 2,000 years old, and was founded by people from the eastern Adriatic. As well as remains from every age since then, it has an abundance of Baroque architecture which would make it one of Italy's most visited cities if it weren't quite so far away from the centre. Apparently the local limestone is described as butter-soft and easy to carve into intricate and detailed embellishments for the many churches and palaces, and it hardens on contact with the air. Everywhere you walk in the city, you can look up to see carvings of angels, human faces, animals, plants, and fanciful curlicues - supporting balconies, surrounding doorways and windows, and decorating the capitals of columns. It was a 15 minute walk into the main square and the historic centre, and once there, we first looked at the Roman amphitheatre.



You can see that it's currently in use, though not tonight, apparently. It was built in the second century AD and held more than 25,000 spectators - though the population of the town in Roman times was only 6000! In the Middle Ages it went out of use and was buried under what became the Piazza Sant'Oronzo, the town's main square. It was discovered again in 1929 during excavations for the building of a bank and has since been partially excavated. More of it remains buried under adjacent buildings, so it is no longer a complete oval. However, the seating tiers and part of the floor that have been uncovered are now open and used for concerts and other performances in the summer.

Just behind the amphitheatre in my photo you can see a loggia called the Palazzo de Sedile - Sedile meaning seat or bench. It was built in 1592 to accommodate the local government, and was open at the sides so the governors could be seen governing. To the right of that, you can see a column topped by a statue of the city's patron saint, Saint Oronzo, who is credited with saving the region from the plague. He was an early Christian who was beheaded by the Romans for refusing to worship pagan gods, and he appeared in a vision to the local bishop during the plague in the 17th century, which stopped all plague in the area. The column under the statue is actually Roman, and came from the city of Brindisi whose citizens donated it because they were so grateful that they too had been saved from the plague.

As well as palaces, Lecce is full of churches as there were so many different monastic orders here, and so I photographed quite a few. However, photography in the streets was not easy because, just after we had left the amphitheatre, the heavens opened and a wall of water descended from the sky. The streets were soon ankle deep in running water - and we had no umbrella. We were obliged to buy 2 cheap umbrellas, and even so, we got very wet indeed. So we saw the insides of many more churches than we intended, as we took shelter from time to time. This is the reason for few outdoor photos - they could only be taken in the brief breaks from the heavy rain.

We hurried into the nearest church, which was full of niches encrusted with baroque ornament. The guide asked us to guess what the ornaments were made of, and we guessed stone, plaster and wood. But we were all wrong, it was made of papier-mâché. I did take photos, but without flash, so they aren't very good. However, I took similar photos in the Duomo where we went next



The ornamentation here was carved stone, but I think you can see what I mean by describing it as encrustations! There was a wedding being held here, amidst all the damp tourists listening to guides in several different languages. The bride was late because of the rain, and her bridesmaids were even later. It must have been quite difficult for women wearing long dresses because the piazza outside was under several inches of water

We went into St Irene's church, where I was told off for taking pictures, then, as the rain had lessened a bit, we went to look at the Roman theatre.




Like the amphitheatre, this small semi-circular Roman theatre had gone out of use and been buried before the Renaissance. It was uncovered in the 1930s, and though it looks small, it apparently would have seated 8000 people. It is in use for theatrical performances and there was one proposed for this evening which, given the rain, we did not fancy. Also, there were not many seats and those stone tiers look very hard!

The last church we visited was the Basilica di Santa Croce, widely considered to be the finest example of the Barocco Leccese style, and its façade is a riot of ornamentation. Unfortunately when we visited much of that façade was covered in scaffolding as restoration was in progress.




The church was built over a lengthy period, starting in the mid sixteenth century when construction started on a replacement for an earlier monastery church on this site. The lower part of the façade was finished by 1582 and the dome by 1590. But it was 1699 before the church could be considered finished, with the addition of the upper façade.

The columns you can see just at the bottom of my photo are surmounted by a frieze and above that a number of human and animal figures support the upper section. The human figures represent Turkish prisoners taken by the Christian League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, while the animals symbolise the Christian powers who fought the battle: the eagle the Holy Roman Empire, the dragon the symbol of the family of the Pope at the time, the griffon the Republic of Genoa, the lion the Republic of Venice and so on. Near the top in the centre is the elaborate rose window.

Santa Croce means Holy Cross, and this church is so called because it has a relic, a piece of wood said to be a fragment of the true cross. I took a photograph of the reliquary, but, like many of my interior photos taken without flash, it wasn't very good.

By the end of the tour we were extremely wet, especially about the feet, and very tired, so we went to find a sandwich for lunch, and after that, we went to see the Faggiano Museum, an independent archaeological museum authorized by the Lecce government. Mr Faggiano, a chef, bought a building hoping to transform it into a trattoria, but there seemed to be a problem with damp and a possible broken sewer pipe, so Mr Faggiano called his sons to help and they started digging. They found a subterranean world dating back more than 2000 years. They found post holes from ancient wooden houses dating to the 5th century BC, a Messapian tomb (the Messapians were the people from the eastern Adriatic who founded the town), a huge cistern, a Roman granary, etchings from the Knights Templar, 16th century frescos and the remains of a nunnery. So after 7 years of digging by the family, supervised by an archaeologist, instead of a trattoria, the building became a museum.

On the ground floor, glass panels let you look into the the cistern, the granary and the tombs. A system of pulleys let the earliest occupants draw up water from the cistern up three floors.



Upstairs, we looked at the nuns' dormitory.


There was a nun's bed under each of the arches.

A further narrow staircase led up to a balcony turret used as a watchtower in the 14th century. You would have been able to see beyond the old city walls, though today the view is obscured by modern apartment buildings.

Later we returned to the hotel for our siesta. My back is holding out so far, thanks to the shoulder brace, but more than half a day of slow walking and standing about puts it under some strain.

Tomorrow we go to Otranto and the weather report is for more thunderstorms, so we can only hope for the best.

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To Lecce

Monday September 5th

Really, there is nothing much to say about today, as a good part of it it was spent on a train. As we had to be up before 6 and on the train before 8, part of the day was also spent sleeping.

Part of the train journey was very fascinating because we crossed Italy from West to East through a very wild and apparently uninhabited area of hills and forests, with just a few dirt track visible. Once on the east coast though, we were back into a flat agricultural plain where the main interest was in trying to identify the crops and wondering why the vines were all covered with plastic or tarpaulins.

Tomorrow, we don't have to make an early start and we're having a walking tour of Lecce, and there are Roman ruins and a museum to see, as well as Baroque buildings. The day after that, we might go to Gallipoli. But we also hear the weather is planning to be very bad, so we'll just have to wait and see.


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Rome!

Sunday September 4th

Today we had one complete day in Rome. We had obviously chosen the wrong day, because today was the day Mother Theresa was being canonised, so we were warned that it would be impossible to approach St Peter's Square or the Vatican because of the crowds. Because of terrorism fears, many streets in the area were completely blocked off. So no visit to the Sistine Chapel either! It's 50 years since we were in Rome - we were here for a few days when we were on honeymoon - and we had seen St Peters, the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, but had intended to go again. But we were obliged to do other things instead.

In the morning our group had a long bus and walking tour round the city. We started at the Coliseum, one of the most popular of the city's sights, built by the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus and completed in AD 80. Our guide told us that it would have seated between 50 and 60 thousand people, and they were able to enter and leave very quickly because there were 80 entrances.



It almost seemed as if there were very nearly that number queuing to get in today, this being the first Sunday of the month so that Museums were free. But there weren't 80 entrances today, so the queues were rather slow, and standing in the hot sun did not appeal. Our guide suggested trying to get in around 5pm when it should be quieter and certainly cooler, but we were a bit too exhausted by 5.

We also drove round the old Forum, with views up to the Palatine Hill, another place we visited 50 years ago and would like to visit again. We passed the site of the Circus Maximus.




There's not a lot of it left,but you can clearly see the shape in the valley, with raised areas on either side for the spectators. There would have been a wall down the centre, the spina, round which the chariots raced.

We drove past the Baths of Caracalla, an enormous edifice where 6000 people a day could bathe in four shifts



The grounds are extensive, and this was another place we would like to visit - clearly we will need to return.

We drove past another building where we paused very briefly to admire the balcony from which Mussolini made most of his speeches, then we went on to the Victor Emmanuel monument, looking even more gleaming white in the bright sunlight. It's often known as Mussolini's wedding cake, and it certainly looks as if it was made of white icing. My photo, taken as it was from the bus window, isn't very good so I won't post it here.

We had to get out of the bus and walk after that, and we walked to the Trevi Fountain where we spent quite a while.


It was extremely difficult to photograph with so many heads in the way, but it was slightly easier from the side. Our guide explained that it's at the junction of three roads (tre vie) and the water comes from a source called the Acqua Vergine; this used to be called the Aqua Virgo and was one of the aqueducts that supplied water to ancient Rome, built by Agrippa. The legend about the water is that in 19 BC, a young girl showed some Roman soldiers a source of pure water a few miles outside the city, hence the aquaduct's name.
I threw a small coin into the fountain to make sure I come back again. I did it last time I was here and it obviously worked, even though it took 50 years. The coin I threw today had better work a bit quicker!

We passed through a nice air conditioned shopping mall and went outside again to admire the column of Marcus Aurelius, which is quite similar to Trajan's column. I didn't get a decent photo of Trajan's column, so I took several of this one.



We stopped to admire the building housing the Chamber of Deputies, with a very nice Egyptian obelisk outside, then passed on to the Pantheon.



This was a building we didn't visit 50 years ago so I was desperate to go inside but today is Sunday, and it was time for mass, so there was a service inside and it was closed to tourist visits, which was a great disappointment.

Nearby is the French church in Rome. It is called the Chapel of St Matthew and contains 3 wonderful Caravaggios which we went in to see. I took photos but they aren't very good, sadly.

We went on to the Piazza Navona, very picturesque, which was built on the site of the Stadium of Domitian. The Romans used the stadium for athletic competitions.The piazza follows the shape of the open space of the stadium, so it's curved at one end.

The whole piazza is an example of Baroque architecture, with many fine buildings. In the center stands a famous Baroque fountain, the Fountain of the Four Rivers, sculpted by Bernini; it stands right in front of a church designed by Bernini's great rival, Borromini. It's said that the figures on the fountain facing the church are shielding their eyes in horror from the facade of Borromini's church. I'm afraid my photographic skills aren't quite up to that!

By this time my back was getting sore so we headed for the bus back to the hotel for a rest, passing by the Baths of Diocletian. As they are very close to our hotel, we thought of visiting them, but decided against it later owing to a poor review in our guide book.

We cooled down and rested over the lunch period in our hotel room, (first ice cream of the day!) and decided that we might devote ourselves to art in the afternoon. So we set off for the Palazzo Barberini, a place we had never visited before. There was a most interesting exhibition of recovered cultural artefacts which had been stolen at one time or another, and the selection was highly eclectic, ranging from ancient Etruscan artefacts, Roman frescos and pottery to paintings from the 20th century.



The photo above is of a statue said to be connected to the cult of Mithras. Mithras was the a soldiers' cult and involved bull sacrifice, and this is a Roman soldier sacrificing a bull.

There was a huge collection of red figure pottery, and the collection of paintings ranged right through the centuries, some having been looted by the Nazis, but many more having been stolen from museums and private collections relatively recently. And of course there was quite a collection of ecclesiastical artefacts, since churches often have poor security.

The Palazzo itself has an interesting collection of art, and though parts of it were shut today, we saw a great many famous paintings - including the Hans Holbein one of Henry 8th which I think every English schoolchild knows. This post has been long enough already so I won't go on, but we particularly admired a number by Caravaggio



This is his Judith and Holofernes. I don't know why I always seem to photograph paintings squint, and this isn't a very good photo, but at least you can get an impression of it.

Then it was back to the hotel for a further rest before going out to dinner. Later came the second ice cream of the day - melon in my case, and quite delicious. I'm hoping I can count melon ice cream as one of my 5 a day!

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