as tomatoes, capsicum, zucchini and potatoes,
while prickly pears and the custom of transforming
cocoa beans into chocolate are part of the sweet
Spanish legacy.
Most Italians visit the region to bathe at sandy
bays and limestone coves; I come for fresh fish caught
by men I know by name, pasta made in distinctive
regional shapes, and homemade digestivi produced
according to century-old family recipes. The openness
of Salentini and their devotion to hospitality make
these essential features of daily life accessible even to
first-time visitors.
We arrive in Lecce by train (mercifully air-
conditioned this time) and make a beeline for Piazza
Sant’Oronzo, the city’s main square of pietra Leccese,
the honey-coloured limestone, wrapped around the
partially excavated ruins of a Roman amphitheatre
and a monument to the local patron, Saint Orontius.
My first snack in Lecce is always a rustico at Alvino, an
historic café beloved for its discs of puff pastry stuffed
with béchamel, mozzarella, black pepper and a touch
of tangy tomato sauce. The café’s display case offers
a crash course in Salento’s sweet and savoury snacks
- almond-paste biscuits, mostaccioli (biscuits flavoured
with cinnamon and cacao), cream-filled bignè and
pasticciotti, the classic local breakfast tart filled with
thick custard – but we stick to savoury rustici here.
Then we follow the cobbled promenade to another
historic café, Cotognata Leccese, near the 16th-century
fortress of Castello Carlo V, for its signature cotognata,
a quince paste similar to Spain’s membrillo. We buy a
couple of thick slices – you never know when you’ll
need to return some Salentine hospitality – then pick
up a hire car for a 200-kilometre clockwise loop around
Italy’s heel. Long-distance train services in the south
have been scaled back in the past decade, making a
driving holiday the best way to see this part of Puglia.
Leccesi treat their city like an open-air theatre, and
their nightly performance of seeing-and-being-seen
begins with aperitivo. Before dinner we stop at Quanto
Basta, where barmen Diego Melorio and Andrea
Carlucci serve craft cocktails from a corner shopfront.
With chrome lights illuminating a bar packed with rare
imported spirits, Quanto Basta breaks the mould in a
city that loves tradition, but the pair champion local
flavours in a way that locals embrace. “We make a lot
of our syrups with fruits from this region, so many
ingredients aren’t so unusual,” Carlucci tells me as
he mixes mezcal, Carpano Antica Formula vermouth,
Choya umeshu and amarena. His Smoky Taboo
symbolises the historical crossroad that Salento
occupies: indigenous cherries and Italian vermouth
meet Japanese umeshu and New World agave.T
he view next morning on the eastern
outskirts of Lecce is sobering. For two
consecutive harvests Salento’s centuries-old
olive trees have been ravaged by a deadly
bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, which leaves the trees
barren and looking as though they’ve been burned
by fire. There’s no known cure, and it’s spreading.
We head east through dying olive groves to the coastal
road, timing breakfast with our arrival at an old-school
pastry shop called Nobile in the humble seaside town
of San Cataldo. Half of my Salentino friends name
Nobile as their favourite place for pasticciotti, served
on gold-foil platters at plastic tables (the other half
nominate Pasticceria Ascalone in Galatina). We take
our pasticciotti with Salento’s summer drink of choice:
caffè in ghiaccio, chilled espresso flavoured with latte
di mandorla, a sweet almond extract. From here we
drive south, past the rugged coves of San Foca, Torre
dell’Orso, and Sant’Andrea. The currents have
chiselled the limestone cliffs of these villages into
a moonscape of crescent-shaped grottoes. In more
adventurous times I’d park on the side of the road
north of Torre dell’Orso, deposit my towel on the
rough limestone platform overlooking the sea and
join a queue of local daredevils to dive 15 metres
into the turquoise waters of Grotta della Poesia.
These days I stick to a rock-hewn staircase descending
to the beach near Tricase.
After a dip in the Adriatic, we cut across the
peninsula to Salento’s Ionian coast, where seaside
towns bear names of the torri, the defensive towers
that protected their inhabitants for centuries. At Torre
San Giovanni, a fishing village and popular summer-
home enclave for landlocked Salentines, we meet
Enzo Bruno on his trawler. He leads the Padre Pio
fishing cooperative, named for a recently canonised ➤Left: caffè in
ghiaccio (coffee
with almond extract),
caffè macchiato and
pasticciotti at Alvino
in Lecce. Opposite:
Otranto, midway
along Salento’s
Adriatic coast.GOURMET TRAVELLER 155