Italy · Salento
Lecce
The most extravagantly carved city in southern Italy, on flat ground between two seas with the whole of the Salento inside an hour.
Lecce is the baroque capital of the Salento, the flat limestone peninsula that makes the heel of Italy, and it looks like nowhere else in the country. The local stone comes out of the ground soft enough to be worked with a blade and hardens once the air gets at it, so a provincial town with no marble money spent the seventeenth century covering its church fronts and doorframes in fruit, beasts, angels and saints until the whole centre reads as one continuous piece of carving. Underneath sits an older town again, a Roman arena half sunk below the main square and Messapian tombs that surface whenever anyone digs a foundation, and around all of it a university city with both coasts of the peninsula within an hour.
Suggested stay
2–4 days
Language
Italian
Currency
EUR
Timezone
UTC+2
Why you'll love Lecce
The stone pietra leccese is a golden limestone soft enough to cut freehand and tough enough once weathered to keep the detail, and it turned an ordinary provincial town into an open-air workshop where even balconies, gateposts and window surrounds carry sculpture.
Layers underneath a Roman arena lies half excavated below the main square, a small Roman theatre hides in a courtyard between palaces, and one family chasing a blocked drain under their own house found tombs, a granary and a cistern stacked up beneath the floor.
Eating this is pastry-for-breakfast country, with a custard-filled shortcrust shell and a puff-pastry disc of bechamel and tomato eaten standing at a counter, chickpeas with half-fried pasta at lunch, and Negroamaro and Primitivo poured everywhere.
Two coasts the Adriatic is twenty minutes east and the Ionian about forty west, so a morning of baroque churches and an afternoon in the sea takes no change of base and no real planning.
Best time to visit
Nov-Sep
13-33° days
40.152° N, 18.226° E
UTC+2 · Europe/Rome
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Weather & when to go to Lecce
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Nov-Sep
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Lecce
There is no bad season here, only two different versions of the place: August lays heavy heat over the inland flats and empties half of Italy onto the Salento coast, so the beaches, the coast roads and the parking are at their worst exactly when the sea is at its best. At the other end of the year the seaside towns and lidos largely shut, autumn brings the heaviest rain of the twelve months, and the city itself carries on regardless because its students never left.
Top things to do in Lecce
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Basilica di Santa Croce - the facade that defines Lecce baroque
culture arts history 👍 PopularBegun in 1549 by Gabriele Riccardi and finished around 1695 by a relay of local masons, this is the building everyone means by Lecce baroque. The lower half is relatively sober; above the balcony, carried on a row of straining figures and beasts, the front erupts into a rose window ringed with pomegranates, vines, cherubs and heraldry until there is barely a flat surface left. The interior is a surprise after that, a calm Latin cross with a heavily carved altar in the north transept, and the huge Palazzo dei Celestini next door, now government offices, was worked on by Giuseppe Zimbalo and Giuseppe Cino in the same idiom.
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Piazza del Duomo - the enclosed square with two cathedral fronts
culture arts history 👍 PopularOne of the very few closed squares in Italy, entered through a single gateway off the main street and otherwise walled in on all sides, which is why it feels like a courtyard rather than a piazza. Giuseppe Zimbalo rebuilt the cathedral here between 1659 and 1670 and gave it a second, far more ornate facade facing the entrance, because that is the side people actually see; his bell tower, finished in 1682, runs to five diminishing storeys and looks out to the Adriatic on a clear day. The bishop's palace with its loggia and clock and the seminary with its extravagantly carved courtyard well complete the enclosure, and the whole thing is at its best floodlit after dark.
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Anfiteatro Romano - the arena sunk below Piazza Sant'Oronzo
history 👍 PopularBank builders hit the top tier of a Roman amphitheatre in the main square in 1901; digging through the following decades opened up perhaps a third of it, and the rest is still under the surrounding buildings. What you see is a sunken oval of seating and animal passages from the first or second century AD, cut straight into the rock and thought to have held something like twenty-five thousand people, with cafe tables ranged around the rim above. On the same square stand the tall column carrying the statue of the city's patron, brought here from the end of the Appian Way at Brindisi and re-erected in 1666, and the little late sixteenth-century loggia of the old town council.
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Castello di Carlo V - the bastioned castle and the papier-mache museum
history culture artsThe largest castle in Puglia, rebuilt between 1539 and 1549 for the emperor Charles V by Gian Giacomo dell'Acaya, who wrapped a trapezoid of four blunt bastions around a much older Norman keep so it could take cannon fire. It stayed military for centuries, which is why it looks so plain beside the churches, and it now holds exhibition halls, cavernous vaulted rooms at moat level and the museum of cartapesta, the papier-mache saint-making that is Lecce's own craft. The walk around the outside is the quickest lesson in why the Spanish walls shrank the medieval city.
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Teatro Romano - the small theatre found in a courtyard
historyTurned up in 1929 during work between two palaces a couple of streets from the main square, and still feels like a secret because you come on it from above with houses on three sides. It is small, twelve or so rows of seating for around five thousand, the only Roman theatre in Puglia, and the attached room holds statues and masks lifted from the stage building. Together with the amphitheatre it makes the case that Roman Lupiae was a far more serious town than the baroque city on top of it lets on.
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Museo Faggiano - the house where a blocked pipe uncovered the city
history ⭐ Highly recommendedIn 2001 a family began digging up their own floor to trace a broken sewer pipe before opening a trattoria, and never opened the trattoria. Under the house, in layers, were Messapian tombs, a Roman granary, a medieval cistern, traces of a Franciscan convent, frescoes and a well shaft, and the family kept going for years before turning the lot into a private museum you climb through on ladders, catwalks and glass floors. It is the single clearest demonstration of what is under every street in the centre, and it is small enough to do in under an hour.
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Museo Sigismondo Castromediano - the Messapians before Rome
history culture artsPuglia's oldest museum, founded in 1868 by a duke who had done time as a political prisoner under the Bourbons, and the place to meet the Messapians, the people who held this peninsula before Rome and wrote in an alphabet nobody has fully cracked. The star objects are trozzelle, tall painted vases with wheel-shaped handles found in Salento tombs, alongside inscriptions, bronzes and material from Rudiae, the vanished town at the city's edge where the poet Ennius was born. It fills the gap that the baroque leaves open.
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Chiesa del Rosario - Zimbalo's last and strangest church
culture artsGiuseppe Zimbalo, nicknamed lo Zingarello and the man behind the cathedral and its tower, started this one near Porta Rudiae in 1691 and died in 1710 with it unfinished, so the planned dome was never built and a plain wooden roof sits over the wildest carving in the city. Inside, the altars run riot with columns, fruit, fish, birds and figures in a way that reads as a craftsman with nothing left to prove, and the architect is buried in the building. Most visitors never walk this far west, which is reason enough to go.
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San Matteo, Santa Chiara and Sant'Irene - the baroque church crawl
culture artsThe centre holds around forty churches and the three worth stringing together sit within a few minutes of each other. San Matteo bulges outward at the bottom and curves inward above, an unusually Roman gesture for Lecce; Santa Chiara is all gilded wood and papier-mache altars under a false vault, opening onto the best small square in town for a drink; Sant'Irene, built for the Theatines and named for the city's former patron, is a great barn of a nave with a pair of enormous facing altars. Doing them in a loop shows how much the local style varied inside a single generation.
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Santi Niccolo e Cataldo - the Norman church beyond Porta Napoli
history culture artsFounded in 1180 by Tancred, Count of Lecce and briefly king of Sicily, and the one important building in the city that predates the baroque. The carved Romanesque portal and the odd, almost Arab dome survive from the twelfth century, while Giuseppe Cino wrapped a baroque facade around them in 1716 and left the old doorway showing, so both centuries are legible at once. It stands inside the monumental cemetery a short walk outside the northern gate, which keeps the crowds away entirely.
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Porta Napoli, Porta Rudiae and Porta San Biagio - the three surviving gates
historyThe Spanish walls came down in the nineteenth century for boulevards and gardens, but the gates stayed and they still mark where the old town begins. Porta Napoli is a triumphal arch of 1548 raised to Charles V, plain and Roman in spirit, and the university quarter sits behind it; Porta Rudiae, rebuilt in the early eighteenth century, carries the patron saint over three legendary founders of the city; Porta San Biagio closes the eastern side near the castle. Walking the ring of the vanished walls between them takes well under an hour and is the easiest way to get the geography straight.
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Cartapesta workshops - the papier-mache saints
culture artsLecce had limestone and no marble worth speaking of, so its statue makers built saints from straw, paper, cloth and glue over wire armatures, modelled the faces and drapery with heated irons, then painted them to pass for wood or stone from the nave. The craft peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, still supplies processional figures and nativity scenes across the south, and a handful of workshops in the old town let you watch the modelling and the scorching. The castle museum sets out the technique if the workshops are shut.
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Pasticciotto and rustico leccese - breakfast at the counter
food ⭐ Highly recommendedBreakfast here is a pasticciotto, an oval shell of lard-rich shortcrust filled with lemony custard and eaten warm, ideally before nine and standing up; the version with a layer of black cherry is the common variant. The other counter staple is the rustico leccese, a disc of puff pastry sealed around bechamel, mozzarella, tomato and nutmeg that comes out hot enough to be dangerous. Wash either down with caffe leccese, espresso poured over ice cubes and almond syrup, which in a Salento summer stops being a novelty within a day.
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Ciceri e tria, puccia and the Salento table
foodThe signature dish of the city is ciceri e tria, chickpeas with wide homemade pasta where part of the pasta is deep-fried and scattered back over the top for crunch. Around it sit puccia, a round bread split and stuffed to order; friselle, twice-baked rings you wet under the tap before dressing with tomato and oil; pittule, fried dough balls handed round at any excuse; sagne ncannulate, twisted ribbons under tomato; and pezzetti di cavallo, horse meat stewed slowly in tomato, which is genuinely local rather than a curiosity for visitors. The wines are Negroamaro and Primitivo, with the rose that Salento makes better than anywhere in Italy.
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Via Trinchese and the evening passeggiata
food nightlife musicAt dusk the city walks the straight run between the main square and the nineteenth-century gardens, and the pavement outside the pastry shops and bars gets three deep. It is a student city as much as a monument, so the old town squares fill up with people who live here rather than visiting, spritz in hand, well before anyone sits down to eat. Do this on a winter evening and the argument that Lecce is a working city rather than a preserved one makes itself.
Best areas to stay in Lecce
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Centro Storico
First-time visitors $$Carved limestone lanes inside the old gates
Explore hotels in Centro Storico →
Piazza Mazzini and Via Trinchese
Value and everyday city $$Nineteenth-century grid, shops and everyday city
Explore hotels in Piazza Mazzini and Via Trinchese →
Porta Napoli and the university quarter
Nightlife and budget $Student bars behind the northern arch
Explore hotels in Porta Napoli and the university quarter →
Around the railway station
Train arrivals $Plain streets, cheap beds, quick trains
Explore hotels in Around the railway station →
Masserie in the countryside
Car and a pool $$$Fortified farmhouses out among the groves
Explore hotels in Masserie in the countryside →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Lecce
Getting to & around Lecce
Getting there
Fly into Brindisi about 40 km north and take the airport shuttle straight to the station in Lecce, or ride the Adriatic mainline down from Bologna and Bari, which ends here.
Flight
Brindisi Salento Airport (BDS)
A single-terminal airport on the coast north of the city, with domestic routes, European low-cost flights and a heavy summer peak that thins right out over winter. The straightforward arrival is the shuttle coach that waits outside the terminal and runs to the city terminal beside Lecce railway station in around 40 minutes; the alternative is a shuttle into Brindisi town and a mainline train down, which is a little longer once you count the connection. Car hire desks are in the terminal and taxis meet flights. Bari's much bigger airport, roughly two hours away by train, often has the better long-haul connections and is a perfectly normal way in.
Train
Lecce station
Lecce is the end of the line. The Adriatic mainline runs down through Bologna, Ancona, Foggia, Bari and Brindisi and terminates here, with the fast services from Rome taking something over five hours and Bari about an hour and a half. The station sits south of the centre, ten to fifteen minutes on foot from the main square, and the regional network for the rest of the Salento leaves from the same building.
Coach
City terminal, beside the station
Long-distance coaches link Lecce with Rome, Naples and the northern cities, often running overnight, and they use the terminal next to the railway station. For some journeys, including several airport runs, the coach is the only direct option.
Ferry
Brindisi port
Ferries from Greece, Igoumenitsa and Patras year round and Corfu in season, dock at Brindisi, from where it is roughly half an hour by train down to Lecce. This is the classic overland approach from the Balkans and it puts you in the Salento the same morning you land.
Drive
The motorway stops short of the peninsula: from Bari the SS16 dual carriageway runs south through Brindisi to Lecce, and the SS613, SS101 and a web of provincial roads fan out from the city to both coasts. Distances across the Salento are short, but the last stretches are single carriageway and crawl in August.
Getting around
Walking
The only sensible way around the centre and one of the flattest historic cores in Italy, which makes a change from hill towns. End to end inside the gates is about twenty minutes, and the polished limestone paving is slick after rain.
Free
City bus
Town buses run from the terminal by the station out to the suburbs, the hospital and the university, and in summer to the city's own beaches on the Adriatic. Useful rather than essential, with frequencies dropping away on Sundays and in the evening.
TBC
Regional train
The southeast regional lines fan out from Lecce station to Galatina, Maglie, Otranto, Nardo and Gallipoli. They are slow, single-track and thin on Sundays, some runs are replaced by buses, and the summer timetable is a different animal from the winter one, so check the day you travel.
TBC
Car
Necessary for the coasts, the masserie and most of the day trips, and a liability inside the walls, where the restricted traffic zone is camera-enforced. Park outside the ring of the old walls and walk in; parking is straightforward except on August evenings and market days.
TBC
Bicycle
The city and the surrounding plain are flat, and hire shops and city bikes make sense for the ring roads, the parks and the run out towards the coast. In the old town the cobbles and the pedestrian evening crowds make walking easier.
TBC
Taxi
Ranks sit at the station and near the main gates, but numbers are limited and hailing on the street rarely works. Book by phone or app in advance for an early train or a late dinner out at a masseria.
TBC
Day trips from Lecce
Otranto
Half dayAdriatic walled port
The easternmost town in Italy, a knot of white lanes inside sea walls with an Aragonese castle on one side and a small harbour on the other. The cathedral floor is the reason to come: a vast twelfth-century mosaic of a tree of life crawling with animals, months of the year, Alexander the Great and King Arthur, laid by a monk named Pantaleone and left untouched when the Ottomans sacked the town in 1480. A chapel behind the altar holds the bones of the eight hundred odd townspeople killed in that siege, stacked floor to ceiling. Swim below the walls afterwards.
Getting there
car | train | bus
About 40 min by car, or an hour or so by regional train with a change at Maglie
Gallipoli
Half dayIonian island old town
The old town sits on a limestone island in the Ionian, joined to the modern town by a bridge and ringed by a sea wall you can walk right round, with a castle guarding the crossing and a working fishing harbour beside it. Underneath are the frantoi ipogei, olive presses cut into the rock where men and animals worked half the year producing lamp oil for northern Europe. South of the bridge the coast turns into the Salento's loudest summer beach strip, which is either the point or the reason to come in spring.
Getting there
car | train
About 45 min by car or an hour by regional train
The Adriatic coast road to Santa Maria di Leuca
Full dayCliffs, sea caves and the cape
The finest drive in the Salento runs south from the Adriatic beaches below Lecce along a coast that turns from dunes and pinewoods to low limestone cliffs. Stops in order: the collapsed karst pool at Roca Vecchia that people jump into all summer, the pines and sand at Torre dell'Orso, the sea stacks at Sant'Andrea, the Moorish bathing villas and sulphur caves at Santa Cesarea Terme, the deep inlet at Castro, and the lighthouse on the easternmost point of the Italian mainland. It ends at the cape where the Adriatic and the Ionian meet, marked by a basilica and a monumental waterfall stair.
Getting there
car
About 2 hr each way by car with stops, and a car is the only practical way
Galatina
Half dayFrescoes and pastry
A quiet baroque town that holds a surprise: the basilica of Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, built by the Orsini del Balzo counts and frescoed floor to vault with hundreds of late medieval scenes, an interior with no equal for a long way in any direction. Galatina also claims the invention of the pasticciotto, and it is the home of tarantism, the summer ritual of dancing out a spider bite in front of the chapel of Saint Paul that gave the Salento its pizzica music. Combining the church, a pastry and the story makes a compact half day.
Getting there
car | train
About 30 min by car or by regional train
Porto Cesareo and Punta Prosciutto
Half dayShallow Ionian beaches
The Ionian side of the peninsula is where the postcard water is, shallow and pale over white sand with low dunes and umbrella pines behind. Punta Prosciutto and Torre Lapillo are the long open stretches, Porto Cesareo is the workaday town with the boats and a marine protected area offshore, and Porto Selvaggio further south trades sand for a pine-shaded walk down to a cold clear cove. Come out of season or come very early, because in August this coast is where the whole region goes.
Getting there
car | bus
About 40 min by car, or seasonal buses in summer
San Cataldo and the marine di Lecce
Half dayThe city's own beaches
Lecce owns a stretch of Adriatic coast about a dozen kilometres east, and San Cataldo has been its seaside since the Romans built a port here under Hadrian, the remains of which still sit by the shore. It is unglamorous in the best way, low-key lidos and free sand, pinewoods and a nature reserve of coastal lakes behind, with Frigole and Torre Chianca strung north along the same road. This is what a weekday evening swim looks like if you live in the city.
Getting there
car | bus
20-25 min by car, or a city bus in summer
Ostuni and the Valle d'Itria
Full dayWhite hill town
The longest reach on this list and the one that leaves the Salento behind. Ostuni is a white town piled on a hill above the olive plain with a late Gothic cathedral at the top and a maze of lime-washed lanes under it, and the valley inland is trulli country, the conical drystone huts that cluster in their thousands at Alberobello and scatter across the fields around Locorotondo and Cisternino. Doable in a day from Lecce with an early start, better as an overnight if you want the hill towns after the coaches leave.
Getting there
car | train | bus
About 1 hr 15 by car, or by mainline train to Ostuni station plus a shuttle up the hill
A little history of Lecce
Lecce's story is written in its stone. Pietra leccese is a fine golden limestone quarried on the doorstep, soft enough when freshly cut to be worked with hand tools like wood and hardening as it weathers, and it meant that a modest provincial capital with none of the wealth of Naples or Rome could still buy sculpture by the acre. What it bought was a school of local masons, above all Gabriele Riccardi in the sixteenth century and then Francesco Antonio Zimbalo, his nephew Giuseppe Zimbalo and Giuseppe Cino in the seventeenth, working through a century when Spanish rule was stable, the counter-reformation orders were competing for attention and Ottoman raiding had finally eased. The result is a city that was largely rebuilt in a single style within a few generations, which is why it hangs together and why people have called it the Florence of the south for two hundred years.
Underneath that is a much older place. The Messapians held this peninsula before Rome, with their own language and their tomb pottery, and their town of Rudiae on the city's edge produced Ennius, the poet the Romans themselves treated as the father of Latin verse. Roman Lupiae got an amphitheatre, a theatre and a port on the Adriatic; Byzantine, Norman and Spanish rule each left a layer, the last of them ringing the town with bastioned walls and gates in the sixteenth century. The walls came down after Italian unification to make boulevards and gardens, the gates stayed, and a university arrived in the mid twentieth century to keep the old centre in use rather than in aspic.
Messapian settlement across the Salento, with tombs, painted trozzelle vases and inscriptions in a language still only partly understood. Rudiae, just outside the modern city, is the birthplace of the poet Ennius around 239 BC.
Rome absorbs the heel of Italy after the wars with Pyrrhus and Tarentum; the settlement becomes the Roman town of Lupiae.
The town is developed under the empire, gaining an amphitheatre in the centre and a small theatre beside it; tradition credits Hadrian with the port on the coast at what is now San Cataldo.
Byzantine rule, punctuated by Lombard pressure and Saracen raids. Greek rite and the griko language take root in villages east of the city and survive into modern times.
The Normans take Lecce and make it the seat of a county, tying the town into the new kingdom in the south.
Tancred, Count of Lecce, founds the church of Santi Niccolo e Cataldo outside the northern gate; he rules as king of Sicily from 1190 until his death in 1194.
The county passes to Raimondo Orsini del Balzo and his wife Maria d'Enghien, who later becomes queen of Naples; the Salento enjoys a long spell of local power and building.
An Ottoman force sacks Otranto, forty kilometres away, and the shock drives a century of wall and watchtower building along the whole Salento coast.
The castle is rebuilt for Charles V by Gian Giacomo dell'Acaya as a bastioned artillery fortress, and new walls are drawn tighter around the town.
Porta Napoli goes up as a triumphal arch in honour of the emperor, on the road north.
Gabriele Riccardi begins the basilica of Santa Croce, the building that will take nearly a century and a half to finish and set the template for the local style.
Giuseppe Zimbalo rebuilds the cathedral and encloses Piazza del Duomo, adding a second decorative facade facing the entrance; his bell tower follows by 1682.
Lecce escapes the plague that guts much of southern Italy, credits its patron Oronzo, and re-erects a column brought from the end of the Appian Way at Brindisi in the main square with his statue on top.
Zimbalo begins the Rosario church and dies with it unfinished; the papier-mache workshops and the stone carvers are at their height in the same decades.
Italian unification. Lecce becomes provincial capital of the Terra d'Otranto, and over the following decades the Spanish walls are demolished for boulevards and public gardens.
Foundation work for a bank in the main square strikes the buried Roman amphitheatre; excavation continues in stages through the following decades and exposes roughly a third of it.
The Roman theatre is discovered in a courtyard between palaces, the only one known in Puglia.
The University of Salento is founded and then taken into the state system, eventually bringing tens of thousands of students into a city of under a hundred thousand people.
A family digging for a broken pipe under their house uncover Messapian, Roman, medieval and monastic layers; the excavation later opens to the public as a private museum.
Cheap flights into Brindisi and a wave of attention on the Salento coast turn a quiet provincial capital into a summer destination, while the Xylella bacterium begins killing the peninsula's ancient olive groves.
Know before you go
Payment
Cards & cash mixed
English
Widely spoken
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type C / F / L
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+39
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FAQs about Lecce
▸ When is the best time to visit Lecce?
Almost any month works, which is unusual in southern Italy. Spring and early autumn are the sweet spot for combining the city with the coast, warm enough to swim at the edges of the season and mild enough to walk all day. Midsummer is hot on limestone and the coast is at its busiest, so shift the sightseeing to early morning and evening and treat the sea as the afternoon plan. Winter is mild, green and very quiet, with the baroque more or less to yourself, though this is when the seaside towns shut and when the heaviest rain of the year comes through in autumn.
▸ How many days do you need in Lecce?
Two days covers the city properly, one for the baroque centre and one for the Roman layers, the museums and an unhurried evening. Give it four or five if you are using Lecce as your Salento base and driving out to the two coasts, Otranto and Gallipoli, which is the way most people should approach it.
▸ Do you need a car in Lecce?
Not for the city, which is flat, compact and largely pedestrian, and where a car inside the walls is an active nuisance because of the camera-enforced traffic zone. For the Salento the answer flips: trains and buses reach Otranto, Gallipoli and Galatina but run slowly and thin out on Sundays, and the cliffs, the beaches between the towns and the countryside masserie are effectively car-only.
▸ Is Lecce a good base for the Salento?
Yes, and it is the obvious one outside high summer. It sits near the middle of the peninsula with the Adriatic about twenty minutes east and the Ionian about forty west, it has the region's rail and coach connections, and it stays open and lively when the coastal towns are boarded up. In peak August some people prefer to base on the coast itself to avoid the daily drive back inland into the heat.
▸ What is Lecce baroque?
A local variant of the seventeenth-century Italian baroque defined by its material rather than its architecture. Pietra leccese carves almost like wood, so decoration ran wild across facades, altars, balconies and doorframes in a way that would have been ruinous in marble, and the depth of the carving matters more than the plan of the building behind it. The names to know are Gabriele Riccardi, who started it, and Giuseppe Zimbalo and Giuseppe Cino, who took it as far as it would go.
▸ Can you swim in Lecce?
Not in the city, which sits about a dozen kilometres inland, but the city's own beaches at San Cataldo, Frigole and Torre Chianca are a twenty-minute drive east on the Adriatic and are served by buses in summer. The water everyone photographs is further out, along the cliffs south of Otranto and on the Ionian side around Porto Cesareo and Punta Prosciutto.
▸ What should you eat in Lecce?
Start with a pasticciotto and a rustico for breakfast and a caffe leccese over ice. At lunch or dinner look for ciceri e tria, chickpeas with part-fried pasta, puccia bread stuffed to order, friselle, fried pittule, sagne ncannulate and pezzetti di cavallo, the local horse meat stew. Drink Negroamaro, Primitivo or Salento rose, which is among the best in the country.
▸ Is Lecce expensive compared with the northern art cities?
No. It is noticeably gentler on the wallet than Florence, Venice or Rome for rooms, eating and drinking, and the great baroque churches ask very little compared with the ticketed circuits up north. The exception is the Salento coast in high summer, when seaside rooms and beach clubs move into a different bracket altogether for a few weeks.
▸ How do you get to Lecce from Rome or Bari?
Fast trains run direct from Rome and take something over five hours, coming down the Adriatic through Bari and Brindisi to the terminus at Lecce; from Bari it is around an hour and a half. Flying is quicker overall, into Brindisi with a 40-minute shuttle to the station, or into Bari with a train down.
▸ Is Lecce walkable?
Very. The old town is one of the flattest historic centres in Italy, which makes it far easier going than the hill towns further north, and you can cross it in twenty minutes. The surfaces are the catch: worn limestone slabs polished by centuries of feet, slippery when wet and hard on thin soles.
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