We spend a relatively easy morning sipping coffee and looking at maps and discussing the merits and faults of various weather and directional apps. Out around 10am and headed for Lecce.
The drive started with the traditional wrong turn for good luck, this time presenting us with a railroad crossing with the gate down. Well, hey, that means no one is coming from the opposite direction and and making that 3 point U turn isn’t risking your life OR pissing anyone off.
We had a parking lot programmed into the GPS as our destination this time and presto! We found it straight away. Of course the parking spaces were pretty tight but honestly, I don’t think there are any spots in Italy designed to accommodate the battle ships we are driving.
Lecce reminds me of Noto in Sicily in it’s architectural variety. There is ancient and plain, there is fancy and there is rococo double extra fancy.
One of the most interesting places we visited was the Museo Archiologico Faggiano. What was and still appears from the outside to be a simple small house on a narrow street in the center of town, turns out to be around 3000 years of historical amazing. The Faggiano family bought the place in the 1990s as a rental property which it was until 2001 when they decided to renovate and open a cafe. The renters had always complained of dampness and so they figured that there was probably a leaky pipe under the stone floor. They got the permit from the city to do the work on the pipe and renovate for a cafe. They busted through the floor to fix the pipe and as they dug they kept finding odd bits of pottery and other things. They kept digging and finding things and digging and finding stuff and eventually one of the neighbors reported them to the archaeology police. The government sent someone to investigate and sure enough the place was deemed historically important and would need to be completely excavated before they could do anything with the building. The government would do it but there was just one problem, there wasn’t any money to do it for now. They would have to shut the building and wait until the government could get around to excavating. It’s Italy, that could be next year, that could be 10 years from now. The other option was to do it themselves under the supervision of a government provided archaeologist. So Luciano and his 3 sons (12, 19 and 21 years old) started digging. They uncovered 10s of thousands of artifacts, as well as whole rooms, escape tunnels, cisterns, granaries, tombs, it went on and on… sometimes they would have to lower the youngest on a rope into the smaller spaces to fill buckets with dirt and whatever else. There was even a pit for draining the blood out of bodies before entombing them. At one time the place was a convent… at another time it was a place for the Knights Templar to stop and get armed on their way to crusades…
So 7 years after they started what should have been a couple of weeks work, they had a really cool and historically significant private museum instead of a cafe. This whole story was told to us by the middle son with much humor and enthusiasm. If you ever get to Lecce be sure to check it out. It made the front page of the New York Times if you want to read their story…
Dinner was at the restaurant that it wasn’t yesterday. It was excellent. The menu was a bit of an adventure… first time I’ve seen ‘asino’ on a menu (donkey) not the first time I’ve seen cavalo (horse). There was however amazing vitello, pea soup with quail egg, priest’s ears in a marinara, a delicious mixed grill with lamb and veal… oh… and some wine…
Tomorrow we head off north along the Adriatic coast towards Manaio then Spoleto.
Distracted1 
I sure enjoy John’s blog, love his sense of humor. Linda