Lecce Culture

Lecce's culture is bound up with what its craftsmen could do with soft stone and cheap materials, and with the music of the countryside around it.

Barocco leccese

The local baroque is a recognised style in its own right, not a provincial copy. Because the stone cuts so easily it is far denser and more figurative than baroque elsewhere — fruit, animals, grotesques, caryatids and foliage packed edge to edge. Giuseppe Zimbalo is the name most attached to it, and the finished facade of Santa Croce, completed in 1695, is the high point.

Cartapesta

Lecce's other craft is papier-mâché. Straw, paper, glue and plaster were what workshops could afford when stone and wood were not, and they used them to make devotional figures of real quality. The trade still exists, there is a museum of it in the castle, and it remains a genuine local industry rather than a revival.

Pizzica

The Salento's music is the pizzica, a fast tambourine-driven dance historically tied to tarantismo, the belief that a spider's bite could be cured by dancing it out. It has been thoroughly revived, and the Notte della Taranta at Melpignano in late August is now one of the largest music events in Italy.

What it eats and drinks

The Salento kitchen is poor-food cooking taken seriously: orecchiette, horse meat, chickpeas and wild greens, the puccia bread, the flaky rustico and the custard-filled pasticciotto that is eaten for breakfast. The wines are the region's own dark reds, Negroamaro and Primitivo.

A university city

Around twenty thousand students keep the centre open and busy well outside the tourist season.