Lecce
Discover Lecce
A concise introduction to Lecce, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Lecce is the principal city of the Salento, the peninsula that forms the heel of Italy, and has about 95,000 residents.
The centre is small, flat and walled, and almost everything in it is made of the same honey-coloured pietra leccese. The set pieces are the Basilica di Santa Croce, whose facade is the most extravagant thing in the city; Piazza del Duomo, an enclosed square entered through a single gap; and Piazza Sant'Oronzo, where a Roman amphitheatre sits sunk below the modern pavement.
The city is also a working university town, which keeps the centre busy outside the season in a way that most southern towns of this size are not. The Adriatic is about ten kilometres east and the Ionian around twenty-five to the south-west, so both coasts are an easy drive.