Lecce

Legend tells of a Messapian town called Sybar, founded at the time of the Trojan War and conquered by the Romans in the 3rd century BC, who renamed it Lupiae. Under Hadrian, in the 2nd century AD, the town moved about 3 km to the north-east and took the name Licea or Litium; it had a theatre and an amphitheatre and was linked to the Hadrian Port at today's San Cataldo. Saint Orontius, Sant'Oronzo, is considered its first bishop and is still its patron.

Totila's Ostrogoths sacked Lecce during the Gothic Wars, and from 549 it was part of the Eastern Roman Empire for five centuries. After the Norman conquest in the 11th century it regained commercial and political weight — Count Tancred of Lecce became the last Norman king of Sicily — and it flourished under the Hohenstaufen and Angevins as one of the largest fiefs in the kingdom. In the first half of the 16th century Charles V gave it new walls and a castle against Ottoman attack.

From 1630 the city was rebuilt and embellished in its own Baroque, carved in the soft local stone by architects such as Giuseppe Zimbalo. A plague in 1656 killed a thousand people; tradition tells of a miracle through Saint Orontius's intercession. Between 1895 and 1915 the city first spread beyond its walls. During the Second World War Lecce was an air base, used in 1944–45 by American B-24 bombers. The university was founded in 1955, and in 2015 Lecce was Italian Capital of Culture.

Lecce's culture is written in stone. The local limestone is very soft and workable, which allowed the dense ornament of facades such as Santa Croce, where animals, grotesque figures and plants crowd around a large rose window. The stone is still one of the city's main exports and a material for local craftsmen.

The other great craft is papier-mâché, cartapesta, a tradition unique to the region: most of the statues in Lecce's churches are made of it, the city has a museum devoted to it, and in December the Fiera dei Presepi e dei Pupi fills the centre with crib figures in papier-mâché, stone and terracotta. The year's main feast honours the patron saints Oronzo, Giusto and Fortunato from 24 to 26 August, with a procession from the cathedral through squares hung with illuminations.

Lecce is the capital of the Salento, with its own dialects and the pizzica, the folk dance that began on the peninsula; nearby, the villages of the Grecìa Salentina still speak Griko. The University of Salento gives the old town a young population, and football is a passion: US Lecce, founded in 1908, play in Serie A, and fans call themselves giallorossi or lupi, the wolves.

About 94,400 people live in the municipality, the largest city in its province, with an older population than the national average — roughly a quarter are over 65. Around nine in ten were born in Italy; the largest groups born abroad come from Albania, India, Senegal, the Philippines and Romania. The city is divided into ten districts, from the Centro and Mazzini to Santa Rosa, Rudiae-San Pio and Ferrovia-Casermette, with outlying villages and a stretch of Adriatic coast.

The economy rests on agriculture, above all olive oil and wine, on crafts such as papier-mâché and stone carving, on ceramics, building, services and tourism. The University of Salento is based here, and a national nanotechnology laboratory works alongside it. Adriana Poli Bortone has been mayor since June 2024.

Days follow the southern rhythm of a long lunch, quiet afternoons and a lively evening walk through the old town. In summer much of the city decamps to the coast, while in August Italian holidaymakers and emigrants returning home fill the Salento, and the old town is crowded until late.

Lecce's own sweet is the pasticciotto, a small shortcrust pastry about 2.5 cm thick filled with lemon-flavoured custard, eaten at breakfast and ideally warm; the city has named it its typical cake. Its invention is credited to Andrea Ascalone, a pastry cook in nearby Galatina, in 1745, though later research has questioned the date. The savoury counterpart is the rustico, two discs of puff pastry filled with tomato and mozzarella (or a frankfurter in a popular variant), brushed with egg and baked, a mid-morning or evening snack found in every bar and bakery of the Salento.

Ciceri e tria is described as the emblematic dish of Salentine cooking: pasta with chickpeas, part of the pasta fried for crunch. Taralli, ring-shaped crackers made with olive oil or lard, are common across southern Italy.

The wine of the Salento is made from Negroamaro, a red grape grown almost exclusively in Puglia and especially on the peninsula, producing deeply coloured wines; olive oil and wine are both mainstays of the local economy.