Italy- Lecce & Matera

We arrived back to Italy, this time to actually spend some time here, early morning after a nighttime Igoumentisa-Brindisi crossing. After reconciling ourselves to the fact that we were now slowly heading home, we had a last minute change if plan and decided to start our Italy adventure by going South!

Lecce tempted us in promising extravagant baroque buildings in a walled city and we were not disappointed! We managed to find our way to the main square by some miracle using Eddie-nav (a sophisticated technique involving just asking Eddie’s opinion at any junction) just in time for a land train tour of the place- which after Eddie asked very nicely we decided would be a great idea. We enjoyed being proper tourists and actually getting to listen to the audioguide as Eddie was so entertained just by being on a ‘train’ and Sammy happily flirted with some Italians behind us.

We completed our explorations with a lift up to the top of a bell tower for an aerial view and a good leg stretch on a playground then hopped back in the van to continue with the original Italy plan: the cave-dwellings of Matera.

All the Lecce excitement meant we arrived in Matera a little later than planned, but lucked out en route to town as there was a festival that meant the castle was open as a one off and we got an English tour run just for us by four nervous local students before we found an underground trattoria in the sassi (area of cave dwellings) for an amazing Italian dinner.

The next days we decided to stretch our legs a bit and left a bike in the city and parked the van the other side of the gorge to walk through where the rock the sassi are now carved out of was exposed and the earliest of the sassi were dug, including churches still containing ancient frescoes. It was a beautiful wander with amazing views over the town.

Next we hit a museum in one of the old cave-dwellings explaining the history of the Sassi- initially built as spacious mansions with gardens dug into the rock and later became overcrowded and home of the poorest with their animals, becoming the ‘shame of Italy’ after a report and media coverage into he 1950s revealing the dreadful unsanitary conditions and the infant mortality rate of 44% in the poorest areas. They were eventually abandoned after those living there were rehoused and only started being renovated more recently as museums, exhibits, cafes and hotels.

We next visited some more recent cave churches connected by a tunnel then decided we deserved a break from hardcore touristing and found a cafe dug into the rock for some frappes and a few games of UNO before Adam headed off to retrieve the bike and then go bring the van back to town. We met back up in the centre at a foccacceria for a pizza & foccacia dinner.