Our first day on riding around Salento was amazing. But before I get to that, maybe I should pull out the map. Puglia, sometimes called Apulia by the English, is the southeast part of Italy on the Adriatic Sea. The very southern part of Puglia is Salento. If you think of Italy as looking like a boot, well then Salento is that stiletto heel. Look for the blue dot on the map.
Over the next week, we are going to doing a complete circuit of Salento. This shows how far we went on the first day - about 60 kilometers.
It rained a good deal during the night, but by the time we were getting ready to leave the sun was out and it was starting to get warm. We had a great breakfast, and as we were finishing up the local representative from the cycling company showed up. He was a charming young man named Francesco, and he went over the route and explained the GPS to me. They are giving us a Garmin hiking GPS with all seven days of travel set up as treks. We were not so happy with the bikes which both look like they have seen better days. We paid about 125€ each for the bike rental, so really it should be a decent bike.
Francesco stayed with us as we left Lecce to make sure that I could figure out how to follow the GPS. Also, the streets in Lecce are a little tricky, anyhow. At the edge of town we exchanged phone numbers in case of trouble, and he wished us a good trip. We crossed over a bridge above the autostrada - that’s Italian for freeway - and after making a sharp right turn we were on a dirt road traveling through farm fields. The were some BIG puddles in the road from all the rain in the previous 24 hours, but amazingly enough both of us stayed upright and relatively dry.
Our first stop was the town of Acaya, a sixteenth century fortified village. The Turks had invaded southern Italy at the end of the fifteen century, and although they had been expelled shortly afterwards Puglia remained a tense frontier between Christendom and the Islamic powers of the east. Acaya is best preserved of a number of fortified towns established to keep the Turks out of Italy.
From Acaya, we continued down the road a bit to the La Cestine wetland. Run by the World Wildlife Federation, this Italian park is the beginning of efforts to restore avian habitats in southern Italy. Despite the rural landscape, the environment here has been seriously stressed by centuries of overpopulation and intense and inappropriate agriculture.
Despite the environmental problems posed by monoculture, endless fields of olive trees are quite lovely. We went through miles and miles and miles of fields like this.
We finally emerged on the Adriatic Sea. Somewhere on the other side of that water is Albania. As on now, Albania not on either of our bucket lists. It was a little breezy, so we decided to postpone getting wet.
We stopped in the village of La Foca for lunch at a place our cycle tour materials had recommended. They spoke even less English that we speak Italian, and they announced we were getting the mixed friend antipasto, their specialty. Folks here in the south of Italy tend to like Americans I am discovering, probably because they all have relatives in New Jersey. So they proudly brought us out and American flag and stuck it on the table. The food really was quite delicious, and there were several more smaller plates that didn’t fit into the picture.
We went to the beach area at the a couple blocks down from the restaurant. Italians tend to all go on vacation in August, so this little town was pretty empty. I imagine in a month or so it will be packed. It was fairly warm, but the wind was pretty intense.
So, there was nobody on the beach, and we did not feel like sitting in the wind, either. We pushed on.
Once again we went through miles and miles of olive trees. As we were approaching Otranto, we saw a shepherd with a dog and flock of sheep. I wished the man a good day and also said, “Buon guirno, cane” to his dog, and very handsome German shepherd. He smiled at me, and proceeded to have the dog go through all the classic sheepherding movements. It was so wonderful I completely neglected to record it! Memories will have to do, I guess.
In the evening we went off to explore Otranto. The historic center of the town is lovely.
The waterfront has this odd statue of a woman with a flag holding a cross. It is a monument to the 800 martyrs of Otranto. In 1480, when the Turks captured the town, they ordered the residents to convert to Islam. 813 men supposedly refused to do so and were executed on the spot. Some historians question the veracity of the account, suggesting that they were probably executed for resistance to the Turkish forces and were never given the option of conversion to save their lives. Nevertheless, the story of the martyrs is important to the people of Otranto and they were declared saints recently by Pope Francis.
Much of Otranto reminds me more of Greece than Italy. This kind of pergola with grape leaves is ubiquitous in Greece.
John found a place to relax near the castle.
While all the men were watching the latest World Cup match on television, some of the young residents of the town, maybe hoping to play for Italy some day, were practicing their game.
