Lecce historical timeline

Lecce is much older than it looks, and the baroque city is only its most recent reinvention.

Messapians and Rome

The Messapians, a people of the Salento distinct from the Greeks who settled the coasts, had a town here before Rome arrived. Under the empire it was Lupiae, a municipium substantial enough to build the amphitheatre that still lies under Piazza Sant'Oronzo, and its port was at San Cataldo.

Byzantine and Norman

After Rome the city passed through Ostrogothic, Byzantine and Lombard hands. The Normans took the Salento in the eleventh century and made Lecce the seat of a county; Tancred, the last Norman king of Sicily, was Count of Lecce before he took the throne in 1189.

The Spanish century

Under Spanish rule the city was walled and given the castle of Charles V in the 1540s, against the Ottoman raiding that had sacked Otranto down the coast in 1480. The peace that followed, and the money of the church and the local nobility, paid for the rebuilding that produced the barocco leccese across the seventeenth century.

The gates

Most of the Spanish walls were taken down in the nineteenth century as the city outgrew them, but the gates were kept: Porta Napoli, put up in 1548 as a triumphal arch for Charles V, along with Porta Rudiae and Porta San Biagio. They now stand free of any wall, which is how you can tell where the old circuit ran.

Modern

Lecce declined into a quiet provincial capital, and the Salento remained poor and heavily emigrant well into the twentieth century. The university was founded in 1955. Since the 1990s the city has become one of the better-known destinations in the south, on the strength of exactly the architecture that centuries of obscurity left untouched.