The Salento
The easternmost point of Italy, with one sea on one side and another on the other.
The Salento is the peninsula that closes Puglia to the south, forty kilometres wide on average, with the Adriatic on one side and the Ionian on the other. From any point both seas are less than half an hour away, and they are different: the Adriatic is rock and cliff, the Ionian sand and dunes.
Lecce is the centre. The local stone is soft and works like wood, and that is why between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city filled with carved facades: Santa Croce is the best known. In Piazza Sant'Oronzo, below street level, is a Roman amphitheatre found by accident in 1901 and never fully excavated.
The coast
Otranto is the easternmost town in Italy: it has an Aragonese castle, a walled old quarter and a cathedral with a floor mosaic of 1165 covering the whole nave. From there the coast runs down past the Ciolo and Porto Badisco to Santa Maria di Leuca, where the two seas meet. On the Ionian side are Gallipoli, Porto Cesareo and Punta Prosciutto.
In the Grecia Salentina, nine villages around Martano, griko is still spoken, a dialect of Greek origin. It is the same area where the pizzica was born and where the Notte della Taranta is held in August.