Lecce Events

The Salento calendar is unusually full, and the best of it happens outside Lecce's walls as well as inside them.

Sant'Oronzo

The city's patron is celebrated on 24 to 26 August, with processions, illuminated arches strung across the streets, a fair and fireworks over the walls. Oronzo is said to have been the first bishop of Lecce and to have been martyred under Nero; his column stands in the square named after him.

Notte della Taranta

Held at Melpignano, about half an hour away, on the last Saturday of August, at the end of a two-week tour of the Griko villages. It is a pizzica concert that draws crowds in the scores of thousands and is now among the largest music events in the country.

The Fòcara

At Novoli, twenty minutes north, on 16 January: an enormous bonfire of vine cuttings built into a tower several storeys high and burned for Sant'Antonio Abate. It is one of the biggest fires in Europe and an entirely local occasion.

The Santa Lucia fair

From 13 December the crib fair fills Piazza Sant'Oronzo and the streets around it with stalls of nativity figures in papier-mâché and terracotta, along with the sweets and roasted nuts of the season. It runs to Christmas and is the point in the year when Lecce's own craft is most visible on the street rather than in a museum.

The luminarie

The illuminated arches strung over the streets for every southern feast are themselves a Salento industry. Scorrano, forty minutes south, builds the most elaborate in the country and switches them on for its own feast of Santa Domenica in July — entire facades of light several storeys tall, made by firms that export the work worldwide.

Holy Week

Processions through the centre, quieter and more sober than the summer feasts.