42. Three Days in Lecce

March 11, 2023

Column donated by Brindici to Lecce--history.  Statue of Orontius (Oronzo).  Amphitheater (built in 2nd century).  Porta Rudiae.

Little food stories.  

The sad olive trees of Sorento.  Who is at fault?

Driving south from Lecce--to Otranto.  The martyrs of Otranto.  Santa Cesarea Terme--turquoise waters of the Ionian Sea.  Words about cornetti.  Supersano:  having lunch in a farm restaurant.  Galatina:  the purpose of fresco (frescoes).  In search of a relic for the altar.

News of PH&F.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 2:07

That was prelude number eight in F sharp minor of Frederick Chopin. As you could probably tell, it is a hard piece. It's also it's all about bringing out the melody while keeping the other notes in the background all evenly played. An important observation, I think. One achieves true success when music and everything else sounds effortless. I may never achieve real mastery, but I sure do enjoy the journey on the way to it. And speaking of journeys, this podcast is about the first three days of our stay in Lecce, a town of 150,000 located in the south of the extreme southernmost subpeninsula of the Italian peninsula, the area known as Salento. Thursday morning we awoke to our new quarters, an old stone barn reconditioned as a B. It's located on a small square near the Chiesa di Santa Irene. Santa Irene was the patron saint of Lece before Sant Aronzo became patron saint. Our little square is used for parking cars and stationing recycling cans. The cars are any color, but the recycling containers are specific colors green for glass and metal, yellow for plastic, brown for organic waste, gray for mixed dry items. The sticker on the can suggest used hairbrushes, and blue for paper. According to the instructions provided by the real estate company that was renting the property, each day of the week is assigned to picking up one of the specific bins. For example, we put the brown can out, but the trash truck did not pick it up, even though it came by. Our daughter Juliet suggested that that's because the real estate company hadn't paid the removal of fees. So I put the bag of trash in the restaurant, the next door restaurant's can, trusting that we wouldn't be found out and fined 50 euros, which seems to be the penalty for virtually all the fare botans listed in the real estate company's book. We walked about 500 feet to the Piazza Sant'Aronzo on our way to visit a small grocery store. Off to one side of the piazza is a column donated by the city of Brindisi to Lece. Brindici had two such columns dating from Roman times, and they gave one to Lecce because they thought a story got went around that Lecce had helped them avoid the plague. But of course, you know, the scientific method says, show me the evidence. Lecce put a bronze statue on top of that column of Santa Ronzo. The statue was recently removed and housed in one of the buildings surrounding the square. Santa Ronzo, or Rantius in English, had been converted by Saint Paul's assistant Eustace or Justice when he was shipwrecked on the peninsula of Salento back in the eight in the forties. Santa Ronzo became treasurer to the emperor, possibly the hated Nero, but refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods and was eventually executed on August 26, 68. He is considered to be the first bishop of Lecce. Next to the column is part of the old Roman amphitheater, buried for 1500 years until 1900, when the Banco d'Italia began building its Lece branch. The amphitheater is now only partly exposed because the church is sitting on the other half. It must be home to a great number of ghosts because of all the ghastly entertainment that went on in amphitheaters. Their entertainment schedules were pretty much universal, fights between animals or between animals and gladiators in the morning, public executions of criminals at lunchtime, and fights between gladiators in the afternoon. Anywhere you went in the Roman Empire, that was a schedule. The amphitheater was built in the second century during Hadrian's reign of Hadrian's Wall, and it is estimated to have held about 15,000. Lecce was a small town. We walked past the amphitheater and past the castle of Charles V to find a small food market where we bought rice for risotto, dried porcinis, chicken bullion, and fresh baby zucchinis. The market is owned by a Bangladeshi family. In fact, most of that street is lined with Bangladeshi businesses. We returned to our place and prepared lunch for four of us because our because Juliet and Jem were joining us. In the afternoon, my wife Eve went over to Juliet and Jem's to help them with a major Turkish towel order that had to be shipped to Japan by the end of February. This involved very careful checking for imperfections and sewing on the Talassa T H A L A S S A homes tag. Check it out online. It's absolutely a beautiful sight. These towels are made in different villages in southern Turkey that have been very much damaged by the earthquake. And every towel is handwoven and quite beautiful. I went over later to visit their house for the first time. It's like all the homes in the old part of Lecce, made completely of stone with a flat roof and 25 to 30 foot ceilings that slope to a point in the middle of the room. They have a long balcony overlooking the Porta Napoli, one of the three gates that remain from the walled town built in the 1500s by Charles V, to protect his possession, that is, the town of Lecce, from invasion by the Ottomans. On Friday we walked around town, even I. We visited a second of the city's three gates, the Porta Rudii. This gate was named after the community that preceded Lece long before the Romans arrived. On the way to the gate we stopped in a gourmet food store where we bought two jars of Arabiata sauce, which means angry sauce, and a kilo of Strozza Preti, which means priest stranglers, as well as a bottle of blood red wine. We had the makings of a very anti-Catholic meal. We exited through the Porta Rudii, turned left and located the Mercato, a covered barket where we bought lettuce and a liter of red wine vinegar, the smallest quantity available, as Italians don't wimp out with watery and sugary vinaigrets when it comes to saucing their salads. I asked the salesman where I could buy fish and he waved toward the door. We exited, turned left, following our noses. Ten feet to the left was another arched doorway covered with colorful strings of beads, perhaps to interfere with fly navigation. We entered, and there stood the fishmonger, deftly flicking live mussels from their shells into small plastic boxes filled with a blend of bits of other seafood, raw shrimp, raw salmon, raw octopus, and raw squid. Frutti di mare, or fruits of the sea, used to garnish pasta. I bought one small box of them and a jar of sea urchin egg sacs known as uni in Japanese restaurants. Eating sea urchins, by the way, is an environmentally beneficial thing as sea urchins wolf down kelp, which does a lot of good for the planet by absorbing carbon dioxide from the surrounding water. I once worked in a Franco-Belgian restaurant in New York City. Salvador Dolly and Richard Burton lived upstairs. One day Mr. Dolly was having lunch, and afterwards a platter of consumed sea urchins came back from the dining room. Curious, I dipped a spoon into the liquid inside an empty sea urchin shell and tasted it. Excretory would be the appropriate adjective, as I was merely tasting the creature's intestines, the edible portion having been consumed by Mr. Salvador Dolly. The fishmonger offered Eve and me two tails of raw purple shrimp, Gamberi Viola, which we popped into our mouths, creamy and only mildly fishy. We walked back home 15 minutes from the Porta Rudiae to our home. The street is lined with pucherillas, shops that sell the local sandwich known as puce, the local fast food. These are round uh loaves split open to form a clam-like structure, then stuffed with all sorts of colorful local ingredients. That afternoon we met up with Juliet and Jem, and we started by sitting in a cafe uh just outside the third porta um and ordered local iced coffee called cafe le chese. It was a cold day, so it didn't really fit, but I wanted to taste the local product. Uh to make cafe le chesy, you start with platonically correct cubes of ice in a glass, platonically meaning uh according to stereotype. You want a perfect ice cube. You pour espresso and almond milk over the ice. The almond milk is made by soaking ground almonds in water, filtering and sweetening with sugar. We ordered a pasticciotto to accompany the coffee. It consisted of a shortbread pastry shell filled with an almond pastry cream and enclosed in another dome of the same pastry uh shell sprinkled with poppy seeds. There are many versions of pasticciotto. Guinea from all this deliciousness, we walked past the Basilica di Santa Croce, which is Lecce's best example of Baroque style sculpture made possible by carving the local Miocene limestone known as Pietra Lecese or Lece Stone. The external facade is a pastiche of VIP Christian personages standing in beautiful arched doorways on top of all sorts of animals that don't resemble their platonic ideals, bears from another planet, as well as dragons that don't belong anywhere, alternating with humans wearing turbans. Guess who they are? An example of human prejudice presented as Christian Orthodoxy. On our way back, we stopped at the Roman theater built in Augustinian times and still good enough to use. Next to the theater is the museum dedicated to the history of that theater. That evening we ate Mexican food. Although nowhere near the Platonic ideals, only a desperately lonely Mexican would set foot in the place, the food and the margaritas were a world better than the Mexican restaurant we had eaten in Paris recently. At least the margaritas tasted like lime, although the tequila did not taste like fermented blue agave. We shared a nachos platter, which sadly lacked guacamole, and the cheese's texture covering the nacho chips resembled some anonymous building material. There was no cilantro and there were no fresh chilies, just a sprinkling of sliced canned jalapenos. I had a tostada with pork in a chipotle sauce. That was actually pretty good. And although the tostada resembled more building material, at least the chipotle sauce made up for that. Saturday, we drove south from Leche to Otranto, which marks the division between the Adriatic and the Ionian seas. This is, of course, is on the east side of the subpeninsula known as Salento. The countryside just outside Leche is a sad mixture of old farms and industry. But as we drove south, industry slowly gave way to local farms, most of which are in economic trouble, caused by the death of their thousand-year-old olive trees. The trees are all suffering from a bacterial disease that clots the xylem tubes, relaying water and nutrients to the leaves. The result is acres of desiccated gray mammoths from whose roots sprout a few verdant suckers. A bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, don't you love those names, is at fault. It attacks over 500 different plants and is spread by a spittle bug named for its tendency to produce bits of foam on the plant. Actually, the bug should be called the pittle bug, but we won't go there. While Xylella Xylella is attacking olive trees throughout Europe, it did start in the leche area. The origin was either an imported coffee plant or a tropical houseplant from Costa Rica. Fortunately, there are ways to combat the disease. It's igniting the usual blame game, reminiscent of the COVID years. The Italian government was too afraid to act proactively, and just as with recent co the recent COVID debacle uh debacle, citizens are blaming the government, screaming corruption and jail time, while ignoring the fact that science underlies everything. Ignore the science and you condemn yourself to a lot of misery. Just a few hundred years ago, Jews and others were blamed throughout Christendom for a disease that was spread by fleas and poor public sanitation. With the olive disease, the culprits are supposedly more culprits are include Monsanto, which supposedly is trying to destroy the thousand-year-old trees in order to sell all new genetically modified varieties. Another culprit that is uh spat out are the mafia and the entrepreneurs who supposedly want to convert old farms into estates for the wealthy. Actually, there is some truth to that, but not that the disease. It's just that the mafia and entrepreneurs are trying to get rid of all the small farms and uh make a ton of money selling them to wealthy people. Uh chemtrails also get blamed for the olive disease, uh, as you might expect. Scientists are often blamed, as of course, as having brought the disease because it guarantees their employment. Uh, Giovanni Melcarni, a farmer who invested his life savings of about 180,000 euros into saving his very old olive trees by grafting resistant varieties, lost many of his grafts to olive tree terrorists who snuck onto his land at night and cut them down. The good news is he has since been awarded millions of euros by local governments to continue using science to find a solution to this horrible scourge. We drove to the easternmost part of Italy, a little projection of land out into the Adriatic, about five kilometers south of the city of Otranto. At this easternmost point, there is a lighthouse called Faro della Palacia. Locals drive there to watch the sun rise on January 1st. Otranto, visible from the lighthouse, is a small harbor with a big history. One of Otranto's most famous events occurred in 1480 when the Ottomans invaded the region and forced conversion to Islam. 800 of Otranto's inhabitants refused conversion and were promptly beheaded. They are known as the Martyrs of Otranto. Recently Pope Francis canonized them. 800 new saints instantly. That means a lot more altars and a lot more stone sculptures. We drove south to Santa Cesarea Terme. This is a town known for its healing sulfurous fumes. People have been taking advantage of their curative properties since the earliest Roman times. There are two explanations for the sulfurous waters, which gush out of the four caves into the sea. The pagan theory from Roman times has it that the sulfur comes from the decomposition of giants who used to live in the area. The Christian story that replaced it has it that a father, having incestuous intentions toward his daughter, chased her down to the caves where God intervened and consumed him with flames. This then is an odoriferous remnant of God's mercy. We walked around a little in Santa Cesarea Terme, admiring the turquoise waters of the Ionian Sea, and then we had coffee. I also had a cornetto alla crema, which originated in Vienna, Austria as the Kipferl, and eventually in France it was called the Croissant. It was shaped into a crescent to commemorate the defeat of the Turks. In the 17th century, the Venetians traded actively with the Viennese and adopted this pastry by piping pastry cream or crema into the pastry while still warm, then dusting with powdered sugar. By this time I had eaten at least half a dozen cornetti in our few days we had already spent in Italy. Not a single one was made with butter, unlike the croissant of France and Vienna. The lack of butter in the dough, however, is compensated with a lovely creamy crema filling. We drove back north through the middle of the Salenta Peninsula to a town called Super Sano, population 4,000. This is home to a restaurant called Massaria L'Estanzie, which means farmhouse the rooms. Made of dozens of rooms, the house's walls are made of the local rock, a type of clastic limestone, whose broken fragments of ancient rock were cemented together a few million years ago with more lime. The resulting dark gray rock is fantastic for making the fences that separate fields and also for building the farm homes. To reach our table inside the farmhouse, we walk through several outer rooms, the ceilings of which were covered with hundreds of bunches of drying Regina tomatoes known as ramazoles. Regina tomatoes are an heirloom variety, meaning that they predate the Second World War. Some farmers still practice the old method, growing plants of Regina alternated with cotton plants to provide the fibers for making the string that ties the tomatoes into bundles that are suspended from the ceiling of the farmhouse. This method is still taught in areas in centers of agritourism. We were seated at a table for four in a room with a half dozen tables. A fire blazed in a fireplace, and two cats prowled the premises, hungry for caresses and crumbs. In the next room was a single table holding a busload of tourists. We started with a local red wine and ordered four auntiepasti, a baked puree of tomatoes and tuna, a gratin of cauliflower, a bowl of deep fried herbed dough balls, and an earthenware casserole of crunchy fried bread cubes tossed with cooked vegetables. We then proceeded to two main dishes or second diati, a lamb stew with tiny black olives, and young horse in tomato sauce. The meat of both stews was extremely tender and both had very delicate flavors. For dessert, we had cookies dipped in chocolate. Not that great. Hoping to taste their spumoni, but they had run out of it. Uh this uh spumoni is one of my favorite ice creams because I grew up in St. Clair Shores, a suburb of Detroit, which it was had a very large Italian Greek sp community. Spumoni was everywhere. After lunch, we walked around outside to admire the fields that provide the restaurants, vegetables, and meats. We descended into a cave that still housed a few pieces of the old olive presses made of local wood carved by expert carpenters, including a six-foot-long Archimedean screw made from a single piece of olive wood. So those old thousand-year trees, uh, if they die, they can be made into Archimedean screws. Our stomachs satiated, we headed back to Lecce. We did make one stop in the town of Galatina. There we visited a late Romanesque church, Santa Caterina d'Alessandra, whose walls are 98% covered with 300-year-old frescoes, each visually representing some biblical passage. Farmers and their families had neither the time nor the money to learn to read. So freschi, the plural of fresco, which means fresh, because it's made out of fresh plaster, taught you elements of your faith. This particular church was built by a local nobleman, Raimondo Del Balzo. His nephew, Raimondello, went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands in search of a relic for the altar. While in Sinai, he stopped at a monastery dedicated to Saint Catherine, whose 800-year-old body was housed there. It was said that her hair was still growing after 800 years, and an oil continued to ooze out of her. Most pilgrims were content to bring back a vial of her oil. However, young Raymondella was more ambitious. He bent over to kiss her fingers, bit one off, and brought it back to his uncle, who promptly placed it in the altar of the church he was building. This, of course, made the church much more profitable. A finger from a prominent saint would do the trick and bring in the money. Well, that's the end for today. I just wanted to let you know what's happening with Project Hope and Fairness. Um we are proceeding with our plans as mentioned in the last podcast only a week ago. One detail I didn't mention at that time is that we will feature along with our chocolates, uh which are of course made with village-made uh chocolate in Africa, we're going to be making pastries solely with butter, organic sugar, and spelt flour. Uh so anyway, that's what we're planning on doing, and uh we're going to be making a lot of progress in the next month. Okay, so and now we finished with our last piece, uh, the second piece, which is a um uh a prelude by uh Johann Sebastian Bach in F sharp minor, the same key that the Chopin prelude was in. I hope you enjoy it and see you next time.