How Was Lecce Built

Almost everything in Lecce is one material, and the character of that material explains the whole city.

Pietra leccese

The stone is a fine, even-grained limestone with very few inclusions. Freshly quarried it is soft enough to be worked with ordinary woodworking tools, and it hardens over years of exposure into a durable surface. That combination is rare: most workable stone stays soft, and most durable stone is hard to carve. It let masons attempt detail at a scale that would have been ruinous anywhere else.

Santa Croce

The Basilica di Santa Croce took roughly a century and a half, from 1549 to 1695, and passed through several architects. The lower half is comparatively restrained; above the balcony, carried on a row of straining figures and animals, it becomes a dense field of carving around an enormous rose window. It is the building people mean when they say Lecce baroque.

Piazza del Duomo

The cathedral square is unusual in Italian terms: a closed courtyard with one narrow entrance, so it cannot be crossed on the way to anywhere. Zimbalo gave the Duomo two facades, one facing that entrance, because the true front would otherwise never be seen.

Two columns

The city's two landmark uprights are both reused: the column in Piazza Sant'Oronzo is one of the pair that marked the end of the Appian Way at Brindisi, given to Lecce and re-erected here in the 1660s, and the obelisk at Porta Napoli was raised in 1822.

Underneath

The Roman amphitheatre sits below the level of the modern square, and beneath much of the centre the soft rock is honeycombed with cellars, cisterns and quarried voids.