Where to stay

La Fiermontina Tucked away in the northern corner of Lecce’s city walls, La Fiermontina is an urban resort par excellence, with its own sculpture garden, olive groves, swimming pool and dining room serving an international take on local specialities. Situated in a 17th-century house, it boasts just 16 guest rooms and suites. It is one of the most stylish and exclusive properties in the city. Doubles from £300. Piazzetta Scipione De Summa,
00 39 0832 302 481, http://www.lafiermontina.com

Masseria Trapanà Ineffably elegant, Masseria Trapanà is a boutique hotel which opened in October 2015, approximately 10km to the north of Lecce in the countryside. The 16th-century country farmhouse features a bijou chapel with original frescoes, a swimming pool with sunbeds, six walled gardens and nine private suites with four-poster beds. Doubles from £435. Strada Provinciale 236, 00 39 0832 183 2101, http://www.trapana.com

Palazzo Rollo Situated just across from the Lecce Cathedral, guests enter Palazzo Rollo through an ivy-covered courtyard. There are three grand B&B suites upstairs and a number of studios below. Don’t miss aperitivo hour on the roof terrace. Doubles from £50. Via Vittorio Emanuele, 00 39 0832 307 152, http://www.palazzorollo.it

Patria Palace Hotel Set in the heart of historic Lecce in what was formerly an 18th-century palazzo, the Patria Palace Hotel is located just opposite the Basilica di Santa Croce. The hotel offers old-world charm at its finest, with a leafy roof terrace and 67 rooms in classic styling. Doubles from £70. Piazzetta Riccardi, 00 39 0832 245 111, http://www.patriapalace.com

Risorgimento Resort Easily one of the most modern properties in Lecce, Risorgimento is located just minutes away from the Chiesa di Santa Chiara and the Piazza Sant’Ortonzo. The five-star design hotel boasts the most enviable rooftop terrace in in the city, as well as chic, contemporary bedrooms, a restaurant, bar and wellness spa. Doubles from £78. Via Augusto Imperatore 19, 00 39 0832 246 311, http://www.vestashotels.it

Travel Information

Lecce is the capital of the province of Lecce in Italy’s Puglia region. Currency is the euro, and the time is one hour ahead of the UK. The average high temperature in July is 32C and the average low is 21C. Travel time is three hours from London Stansted to Brindisi – Salento Airport, which is approximately 40 minutes from Lecce by car.

GETTING THERE
RyanAir flies from Stansted to Brindisi – Salento Airport five times a week. http://www.ryanair.com

RESOURCES
Puglia Promozione is the region’s tourist board and has information on the country’s history, culture and geography. http://www.viaggiareinpuglia.i...

FURTHER READING
Puglia: A Culinary Memoir by Maria Pignatelli Ferrante (Oronzo Editions, £19.99) beautifully discusses the region, the people and its food.

CARBON COUNTING
To offset your carbon emissions when visiting Lecce, make a donation at climatecare.org and support environmental projects around the world. Return flights from London to Brindisi produce 0.41 tonnes C02, meaning a cost to offset of £3.06.

Where to eat

Prices are for three courses with a half bottle of wine, unless otherwise stated.

Local Restaurants

Hosteria alle Bombarde Nestled within the city walls a stone’s throw from the Porta Napoli and boasting a beautiful courtyard with a grapevine, Hosteria alle Bombarde serves cucina povera at its best. From £23. Via Delle Bombarde, 00 39 0832 246 735, http://www.osteriaallebombarde...

La Fiermontina This is the eponymous restaurant in the elegant hotel to the north of Lecce. Young chef Simone Solido has toyed with traditional cucina povera to create a menu that includes a lovely red prawn carpaccio with basil and citrus-flavoured olive oil. From £45. Piazzetta Scipione De Summa, 00 39 0832 302 481, http://www.lafiermontina.com

Ristorante la Torre di Merlino Helmed by the inimitable Antonio Torre, both his restaurant and molecular gastronomy have a flair for the dramatic. Whether you’re after one of the finest pizzas in town or a seven-course tasting menu, you will be well-catered for here. From £40 for the tasting menu, £4 for pizza. Via Giambattista del Tufo, 00 39 0832 242 091, http://www.torredimerlino.it

Trattoria le Zie Translating from Italian as ‘tavern of the aunts’, this small jewel box-sized restaurant serving rustic, traditional cuisine is another great spot to get a taste of cucina povera, however booking in advance is a
must as it’s very difficult to reserve a table at short notice. From £23. Via Costadura, 00 39 0832 245 178, http://www.lezietrattoria.com

00 Doppiozero A prime spot from which to enjoy aperitivo hour, 00 Doppiozero is a deli and restaurant in the shadow of the Lecce Cathedral. Diners can pitch up at rough-hewn tables and enjoy the finest artisanal bread, cheese, salumi and fresh produce. From £28. Via Guglielmo Paladini, 00 39 0832 521 052, http://www.emporiodoppiozero.c...

Cafés/Gelaterias

Caffè Alvino This pasticceria and gelateria offers prime frontage – a lovely little terrace in the shadow of the obelisk where the Leccese congregate for refreshment in the form of coffee and sweets. <strong>Piazza Sant’Oronzo, 00 39 0832 246 748, http://www.caffealvino.it

Cin Cin Bar What this bar might lack in trappings it makes up for in history and location – it was founded more than a century ago and is about as central as you can get in Lecce. It’s a great stop for a coffee or an Aperol spritz. Piazza Sant’Oronzo, 00 39 0832 309 888

Pasticceria Natale Located just around the corner from Piazza Sant’Oronzo, Pasticceria Natale also triples as cioccolateria and a gelateria. Don’t miss its famous pasticcioto gelato. Via Trinchese, 00 39 0832 256 060, http://www.natalepasticceria.i...

Bars

Mamma Elvira Enoteca Of all the wine bars visited in Lecce, Mamma Elvira Enoteca had the longest list of local wines available by the glass, with some fantastic specimens of fiano and greco, along with the omnipresent negroamaro, primitivo and malvasia nera. Via Umberto, 00 39 0832 169 2011

Shui Bar After a heavy meal, a strong cocktail can often prove a soothing balm, and Shui Bar mixes up some beautiful serves. Via Umberto, 00 39 3386 165 202

Vineria Santa Cruz Just north of the Basilica di Santa Croce is a stretch of bars where fashionable young Italians descend in the evenings. Santa Cruz is a classic dive bar in typical Leccese fashion, with an abundance of local wines and craft beer. Local colour can be found in spades here. Via Umberto, 00 3908 3252 0164

Food Glossary

Burrata

Invented in Andria, Puglia, by Lorenzo Bianchini Chieppa in the Twenties, burrata is an outer shell of mozzarella containing a mixture of both stringy curd and fresh cream.

Baccalà

Traditionally in the region, salt cod was eaten on Fridays as meat was forbidden to Catholics. Salt cod was often used in dishes further inland where it was impossible to procure fresh seafood.

Cacioricotta

Created with goat or sheep’s milk, the cacioricotta production method straddles techniques used for cheese and ricotta. It has an intense flavour and is often grated over pasta dishes.

Canestrato

Canestrato is a hard pecorino cheese made from a combination of both goat and sheep’s milk.

Cicoria

Wild chicory is one of the most celebrated vegetables in the south. Puré di fave e cicorielle is an iconic Pugliese dish in which the bitter leaves are boiled and served with a broad bean purée.

Cime di Rapa

Known as broccoli rabe in English, this plant is part of the mustard family and is known for its nutty, bitter flavour. One of the most emblematic dishes of the region is orecchiette con cime di rapa.

Negroamaro

The preferred grape in the province of Lecce, it’s predominantly used to produce red wine but can also be found in rosato (rosé) and frizzante (sparkling) wines, including fantastic metodo classico (double fermentation, as in the méthode champenoise).

Orecchiette

Translating as ‘small ears’, orecchiette is likely the most popular pasta in the region. In Lecce, the hard durum wheat flour is often mixed with orzo, a dark barley flour.

Pane di Altamura

This much-treasured hard bread is made from durum flour. It was given PDO status within Europe in 2003.

Pasticciotto

A favourite pastry amongst the Leccese, often eaten for breakfast with an espresso. Made with shortcrust, it’s traditionally filled with a lemon-flavoured egg custard or ricotta cheese.

Rustico

One of the region’s most savoured dishes for aperitivo hour, a rustico is a filling puff pastry encasing a molten centre of gooey mozzarella and fresh tomato sauce.

Taralli

These delicious crackers are shaped like miniature bagels that are boiled and then baked. The Leccese like to spike them with fennel seeds, poppy seeds and black pepper.

Food and Travel Review

After darkness falls in Lecce, the streets are eerily muted. Taking an after-dinner constitutional, well-fed and well- lubricated with wine, you tend to happen across sites that shock you out of your postprandial fugue with prepossessing beauty. The Basilica di Santa Croce is one such landmark – a hallucinatory vision that would sit easily alongside the works of Hieronymus Bosch or Brueghel the Younger, swarming with details that rivet the attention and beguile the mind – a delirium of cherubs and caryatids, dogs and dragons, fruit and flora, goats and gargoyles, saints and satyrs. It’s a whirlwind of the sublunary and the sublime. It’s mesmerising. It’s a true assault on the senses.

The church is carved from the ubiquitous Pietra Leccese, a local honey-hued stone known for its malleability. When it sets and hardens, it accrues a sodium-vapour yellow patina. The facade was carved from 1549 to 1695, when the city was the capital of the Puglian region under the reign of the Holy Roman Empire. Arguably more than any of the many other cultures that have occupied Lecce, it left the most dramatic architectural imprint: the baroque.

The cuisine in Lecce and the Salento peninsula couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to its Spanish architecture, with a purity of flavour and simplicity of form that often veer into the emotional. Yet, like the Pietra Leccese, it was moulded by the many cultures it came into contact with.

Salento is the stiletto heel of the Italian boot and the southernmost reach of greater Puglia, jutting between the Ionian and Adriatic seas. Largely flat and tremendously fertile, it has been a prized possession throughout history, occupied (or destroyed) by the Messapians, Romans, Ostrogoths, Saracens, Lombards, Hungarians, Slavs, Normans and Spaniards. But never tourists.

The ramparts were raised higher as huge armies passed through the fields, demanding food and water. Robust trade with sailors from the East Indies and Arabia brought in exotic foreign exports such as coffee, tomatoes, chickpeas and red aubergines, which sprouted vigorously and were readily adopted by farming families.

Over 3,000 years a dichotomy grew between the cuisines of the peasant and ruling classes. The former, largely vegetarian as they weren’t afforded the luxury of meat, learned to make do with what they had, finding clever uses for pulses, beans and brassicas, not to mention the Mediterranean melange of wheat, olive oil and wine.

Their cookery eventually took the name cucina povera (the food of the poor), which could more effectively be explained as making use of limited ingredients in ingenious ways, wasting little food in the kitchen, if any at all.

Nobody knows more about this than Silvestro Silvestori, a native Leccese who, after spending years in northern Italy and the United States, returned to Salento to open The Awaiting Table – a cooking school underpinned by his rigorous academic study of local language and culture. We meet at the Piazza Sant’Oronzo in the centre of the city, in between the Column of Sant’Oronzo (the patron saint of Lecce) and the Roman amphitheatre, built by Hadrian in the 2nd century AD as a divertissement for the locals.

Over a cup of caffè con ghiaccio con latte di mandorla (iced espresso with almond milk), Silvestro tells me that the further south you travel in Italy, the longer the coffee beans are roasted. Then he goes further to tell me that ‘if you avoid drinking coffee or wine in Italy you’re committing social suicide’. My social status is well and truly secure; I’ve been ping-ponging between the two ever since my flight touched down.

As we peruse the stalls in the food market, Silvestro brandishes a cornucopia of local produce: wild chicory, broad beans, flour and pasta made from hard durum wheat or mixed with orzo (a dark- hued barley flour). He lifts up a bag containing maccheroni and orecchiette. Named maritati (marriage), one form of the pasta is meant to resemble the penis and the other the vulva. The Pugliese revel in this saucy dish, particularly when it’s served with the slightly bitter local favourite cime di rapa (broccoli rabe).

Silvestro is very much in his element, explaining: ‘It’s just by dumb luck the cooking of the poor is what the healthy want to eat today. So if you ask a lawyer from Sydney or a doctor from New York how they want to live, they’d say less red meat, less sugar, more wine, more time with the family. A calmer lifestyle.’

After making our purchases, we return to the centre of Lecce, where Silvestro’s apartment is tucked away behind a moody little courtyard. The kitchens are a sight to behold. Formerly a stable, the flooring is still made of Chianche, deeply grooved flagstones designed to keep the horses from slipping. Above us there are pots, lanterns and lengths of wire festooned with bunches of dried herbs, strings of peppers and garlands of garlic.

Wearing a simple hunter green chef’s jacket over a smart white collar, Silvestro has a donnish aspect; there is a whiff of the ivory tower about him. However, as we make cappelletti Messicani (Mexican hat pasta), he contradicts the notion.

‘I love country pragmatism,’ he says. ‘I don’t have a ravioli maker but I do have a water glass. That will do.’

The best place to experience that country pragmatism is at Masseria Trapanà. However, it’s a bit of a paradox, as it’s also one of the most luxurious hotels in the region. Located 10km north-west of Lecce, it was recently built by Australian transplant Rob Potter- Sanders. As with many labours of love, there’s a touch of the obsessive, and Rob quips that he’s had postnatal depression since he finished restoring the property.

Masserias are fortified plantation houses that pepper the landscape of rural Puglia. Not only was there the threat of foreign invasion on the peninsula, there was much infighting, so having a defensible farmhouse was essential. Situated within 150 acres of olive groves, Trapanà is built above an ancient olive oil press and subterranean stable, which guests can visit.

Upon entering its striking straw-coloured courtyard, though, there’s little to betray its former agricultural existence. Surrounded by six manicured gardens and a swimming pool, Masseria Trapanà offers nine elegant suites that pay homage to the Salento with details from Morocco and Bali, including outdoor baths and showers.

Most interesting to us, however, are its kitchens. The masseria produces more than 19 different types of produce which are put on the menu as they come into season, including intoxicatingly fragrant citrus such as mandarins, oranges, red oranges and lemons, from which they produce their own marmalade, limoncello and mandarinetto. The latter, a tart mandarin liqueur served ice-cold after dinner, is a potent digestif. Trapanà also produces medlars, almonds and walnuts. Next year, Rob plans to use the green, unripe walnuts to make nocino, a sticky dark brown liqueur.

During the evenings, chef Maria Carla Pennetta demonstrates how to prepare local favourites such as purè di fave e cicorielle (broad bean and wild chicory purée). It’s one of the most popular dishes in Puglia and each chef puts their own stamp on it. Maria Carla pads hers out with potatoes, which makes it easier to digest. Her dishes are best enjoyed in the gardens, perfumed with the heady scent of citrus flowers in bloom.

Trapanà is also well-positioned for forays to local producers such as boutique olive oil press Masseria Melcarne in nearby Surbo. The role of olive oil in Puglia cannot be understated. It was formerly exported across the world as lamp oil, creating incredible wealth for a handful of Pugliese. Most of the arable land was planted with olive trees, of which there are currently an estimated 60 million, making up 40 per cent of Italy’s olive oil production. Peppery with a light acidity, it emphasises the character of the dish it’s added to but it’s better to be sparing with it at the stove and generous at the table, as olive oil loses the nuances of its flavour at high temperatures.

Wine is another thing the residents of the province take a fierce pride in. At Claudio Quarta’s winery in Guagnano, just next to Salice Salentino, he produces a beautiful negroamaro, the grape variety of choice. It offers both fruity and bitter notes that make it the perfect companion to many of the local dishes.

Back in the city, chef Alessio Gubello clinks glasses. He argues the primitivo grape is for Puglia’s north – Manduria and Gioia del Colle specifically. Alessio left home at 19 to work in London and formed a friendship with top chef Francesco Mazzei while rattling pans at The Dorchester. However, like many other Leccese, the call of his hometown was irresistible, and he returned to set up a pasta shop with his wife Emanuela, who makes the freshest tria, triddhri, orecchiette, maccheroni, tortelloni and ravioli at Pasta d’Elite.

Over lunch at Hosteria alle Bombarde, a beautiful little restaurant in what was formerly an armoury nestled in the city walls, Alessio introduces me to Valeria Lucatello, who has been running restaurants for 30 years. Valeria explains that historically, when a girl in the province reached her teenage years, the mother would spend the day picking olives in the orchard and the daughter would cook for the family. Rosaria Tannisi, her head chef, experienced that in her youth and has now been cooking professionally for more than 40 years.

Rosaria’s practice shows. Her food is so perfectly flavoured that it invokes a dopamine rush. Ciceri e tria is a staple pasta dish made with chickpeas, boiled tria (pasta made from semolina flour and water), crispy fried tria and a tomato sauce. Alessio tells me that mignolata is ciceri e tria on a good day, enhanced with freshly caught squid, mussels and clams. Alessio has his own version, with a presentation that would do well in The Dorchester, prettified with rosemary flowers and leaves. After I misinterpret crema di peperoni as red bell pepper purèed with cream, Alessio admonishes: ‘In Lecce, if you see someone cooking with milk, they’re not a cook, they’re a killer.’ In many cases, neither are eggs invited to the party – Puglian pasta is traditionally made with only flour and water.

The final dish is pezzetti di carne al pomodoro (slow-cooked horsemeat served with a piquant tomato sauce). While it may be a bit unorthodox to us Brits, it’s about as cucina povera as it gets: nothing goes to waste, even the trusty family steed.

However, there are those who would like to break with local traditions, employing new techniques, foreign produce and molecular trickery in their cooking. Antonio Torre is one such person and he has met with a hard-headedness from locals (like Silvestro Silvestori) who are more concerned with ensuring cucina povera remains in rude health. Antonio’s restaurant, La Torre di Merlino, is particularly good if you’d like some variation – and his deconstructed spaghetti carbonara is a sight to see and taste.

There’s nothing better than a long stroll after dinner to aid digestion, and Lecce is the perfect place to do it. Narrow streets and alleyways abruptly open into muscular boulevards hemmed in by luminous architecture. Nicknamed the ‘Florence of the south’, it perhaps has more in common with Venice: its quiet streets have the same timeless character.

Lecce is yet to be discovered by tourists but it’s ripe in so many ways. The locals are fiercely loyal to an identity that’s taken thousands of years to construct and they fight not to let it go. It’s been gestating into its current state for three millennia, and when a recipe is perfect, you’re wary of interlopers sticking their fingers in the sauce and mucking it up.