This morning we shuttled from our masseria in Otranto to Lecce, considered by some to be the most beautiful city in Italy and by others to be grotesquely ugly. I'll let you draw your own conclusions once you see the pictures below. Although our bike tour is over and we're sad to leave some of the new friends we've made, we're excited to visit other areas of Italy we've never seen and to revisit some of our favorite places in Rome.
We narrowly avoided disaster this morning, however! As we were getting ready to board the bus for Lecce, I happened to check outside our room (where we had left our luggage for pickup) and noticed that the hotel staff hadn't brought our luggage to the bus! I would not have been happy if we had reached Lecce and discovered we were without our luggage.
We spent the afternoon and evening wandering through Lecce's baroque "old town". There seems to be a church on every street corner, and a highly decorated one at that as you can see from the pictures below.
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| Campanile (Belltower) in the Piazza del Duomo |
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| Basilica di Santa Croce, the most famous example of Lecce's baroque style |
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| Another view of Santa Croce, a little over the top for my tastes |
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| Sant'Oronzo, Lecce's patron saint |
Tomorrow we're off to Matera, where the majority of inhabitants lived in one-room caves until the mid-1950's. It's now a Unesco world heritage site. Wish us safe travels as we venture out onto Italy's highways again.
I admire the beautiful architecture design of Santa Croce Church and the Roman Amphitheater that you can see on Hotel Lecce. And discover the array of unique shops, bars and restaurant. Impress with a function held in one of the eight flexible and elegant rooms.
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