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LECCE

THE Salento, the platform of the heel of Italy, has long known prosperity. After the collapse of the Roman world, this remained an outpost of the eastern empire until it was seized by the Normans in the mid-eleventh century. Thereafter it fell to the successive dynasties that ruled Naples. Otranto was the Byzantine capital, but under the Normans it was superseded by Lecce, which is more strategically placed. No work of art at Lecce is quite as memorable as the mosaic floor of the cathedral at Otranto, executed by a priest, Pantaleone, in 1163–6; and the city lacks the charm of Gallipoli, once a centre of the trade in olive oil with England, where on hot summer evenings the waving of fans drowns the voice of the celebrant in the cathedral. Yet the city has much to offer.

Although Lecce was an important Roman town, with a theatre and amphitheatre of which ruins survive, it is the post-Renaissance architecture that is of enduring interest. The so-called baroque of Lecce begins as an exuberant Mannerism. The local stone is easily worked when first quarried but hardens on exposure, and the builders of late sixteenth-century Lecce quickly learnt of its potential. Their taste for decorative detail made an indelible impression on such visitors as M. S. Briggs, author of the pioneering In the Heel of Italy (1910), and the Sitwells.

A good place to begin is the Porta Napoli with a rather theatrical triumphal arch of 1548 in honour of the Emperor Charles V, who had rebuilt the city walls and constructed the formidable fortress designed by Gian Giacomo dell’Acaja on the opposite side of the town. The straight Via Palmieri leads past several palazzi to the Piazza del Duomo at the heart of the city. This is dominated by the ambitious campanile of the great, if conservative, seventeenth-century architect of Lecce, Giuseppe Zimbalo. Zimbalo was also responsible for the comprehensive reconstruction between 1659 and 1670 of the cathedral, while the nearby Seminario, undeniably baroque with its striking channelled masonry and giant pilasters, was devised by Giuseppe Cino and opened in 1706.

The Piazza del Duomo is the great set piece of baroque Lecce. But almost every main artery has its quota of churches of the period, and there are literally dozens of distinguished palaces. The most spectacular among the churches is Santa Croce, just north of the Piazza Sant’Oronzo, reached from the cathedral by the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Construction began in 1549 on relatively conventional lines. The upper part of the façade, finished almost a hundred years later, was designed by Zimbalo. Late Renaissance conventions are overwhelmed by encrusted caryatids and putti, and by a riot of ornament round a rose window that recalls so many Apulian Romanesque churches. Inexorably the craft of the stonemason establishes its own dynamic. The effect is not altogether elating.

Cathedral: Giuseppe Zimbalo, Campanile, 1661–82.

Cathedral: Giuseppe Zimbalo, Campanile, 1661–82.

The adjacent former convent of the Celestines, now the Palazzo del Governo, may also have been designed by Zimbalo, but was finished by Cino in a more measured baroque idiom. Some way south of the Piazza Sant’Oronzo, carefully calculated for its position at the junction of four streets, is the most appealing of the city’s baroque churches, Achille Carducci’s San Matteo, in which the art of Borromini is reinterpreted in the richly ornamented way Leccese patrons had evidently come to expect.

With the arguable exception of the Renaissance Palazzo Vernazza, the palaces of Lecce are not individually of particular interest. These testify to the agricultural wealth and commercial acumen of their owners. Many have excellent door-cases, some less restrained than others; many retain their iron balconies supported on brackets of varied form. Naturally, the richer families chose to build on the more prominent streets, and their competing yet in some ways complementary mansions contribute as much to Lecce’s character as do its churches.

Giuseppe Zimbalo, Cathedral, 1659–70.

Giuseppe Zimbalo, Cathedral, 1659–70.