Drunk Italians Dancing In The Streets And Other Very Good Reasons To Visit Lecce And Salento

by Dave Seminara on

As I sit in the cool open-air courtyard of our rented apartment, on a hard-to-find street behind Lecce’s Duomo, the sound of carefully spaced church bells punctuates the silence of the mid-day pausa – Italy’s siesta. Our American instinct is to get out and “do something” on this warm, sunny day. But our newfound Italian inclination is to laze about, digest lunch, and think about what we’ll have for dinner.

When the mood strikes us, we venture back into the web of streets in this sultry city between the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, smack near the butt end of Italy’s heel. The streets of Lecce’s baroque centro storico were made for walking and the town’s well dressed residents are out in force, eating gelato, enjoying glasses of wine in sidewalk enotecas and stopping to greet one another, with an exchange of cheek kisses and a flurry of smiles. Overhead, crazy flocks of blackbirds, called rondini, in these parts, swirl and swoop in wild packs, making a racket and creating an eerie, tropical din I’ve never before encountered.

On our first passegiata in the city, we notice music and a crowd forming on Via Templari Street and follow our ears to see what’s going on. A street-side piano player is leading a group of middle aged Italians in a rousing version of what I later learned is a famous WWI era, Neapolitan love song, “‘O Surdato ‘Nnamurato” (The Soldier In Love). I’m not accustomed to seeing people set up pianos on the street, and I hadn’t seen people have so much fun in a very long time. I assumed it was some sort of special festa we were unaware of, but onlookers quickly disabused me of that notion.

“Nesuna festa,” the youngest member of the group told me. There was no festival.
“It’s drunk Naples people.”

But you don’t have to be drunk to want to break out in song on the streets of Lecce. Every evening, there’s a free show waiting to be experienced in the city’s atmospheric baroque piazzas and narrow cobbled streets. Life is lived on the streets here – the weather is warm, the wine is tasty and the Pugliese people are incredibly warm and welcoming.

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Lecce and the Salento peninsula, which makes up the south end of the heel, has long been a trendy place for Romans and Neapolitans to vacation, but it’s quickly finding its way onto the radar of stranieri (foreigners) as well, thanks to a stream of good press of late. In 2010, Lonely Planet named Lecce one of the top ten places to visit in the world, and just recently, Fodor’s named the greater Puglia region as one of four “undiscovered” Italian destinations to visit in 2012.

Fabio Leo, an engaging tour guide who works in Lecce’s tourism office, assured me that Lecce was poised to conquer the world.

“The last two summers we’ve had more tourists visit Salento than any other place in Italy,” he said.

“More than Rome, Florence or Venice?” I asked, not quite believing it.

“Assolutamente!” he said.

Mr. Leo’s numbers may be off by a few hundred thousand, but the point is clear – Lecce and Salento aren’t the far-flung backwaters they once were. Salento is prosperous enough that there’s a movement to secede from Puglia and become its own official province. Below you’ll find several reasons why Lecce and the Salento peninsula make up one of the most underrated regions in Italy.

Lecce. I was based in Lecce for 10 days and every time I thought I’d seen everything, I’d discover a new street or piazza that warranted exploration, an inexpensive restaurant so good that I wished I had time to become a regular or another baroque church I’d want to visit. The city has a relaxed vibe and a huge percentage of the town’s residents turn out for the evening passegiata.

Food and Wine. Every region in Italy has its specialties and Salento is no different. Try the orchiette, the minestrone di fave con cicoria, pasticiottos, and the Salice Salentino wine.

Great Beaches and a Terrific Climate. This is one of the warmest, sunniest corners of Italy and the beaches, on both the Ionian and Adriatic coasts are quite nice. One word of caution on this front – if you don’t have a car, it is very difficult to reach the best beaches in places like Porto Cesareo and the Ionian Coast between Gallipoli and Santa Maria de Leuca via public transportation, especially off-season or in the shoulder seasons.

Endless Day Trip Possibilities. If you have a car, make a circuit of the entire peninsula. If you don’t, your options will be more limited, but you can still get to historic towns like Gallipoli and Otranto on the FSE Regional train line from Lecce’s main train station, and you can also get within 5 miles of Santa Maria de Leuca, where the two seas meet. (Take a connecting bus to complete the trip.)

Incredibly Welcoming Locals. Italians are a friendly, gregarious lot in general but I found the people of Salento to be remarkably warm and welcoming. We had complete strangers offer to drive us to get pasticiottos, I was welcomed into a local soccer supporters club, and my two little boys, ages 2 and 4, were accorded cheek pinches and kisses everywhere they went.

[Photos and videos by Dave Seminara]

A Photographic Tour Of Matera And Alberobello, Where Primitive Dwellings Draw Crowds

by Dave Seminara on

Most travelers are compelled to leave home by curiosity – the desire to know what life is like in different parts of the globe. Many of us, myself included, are especially interested in visiting places where people live a simpler life, without all of the modern technology that most of us in the United States take for granted.

But the more you travel, the easier it is to become jaded. In Italy, there are scores of beautiful small towns, each with their own piazzas, churches and corsos, where townsfolk take their evening passegiata, or stroll. Sometimes, it can become difficult to distinguish one place from the next. But there are several towns in Italy where some residents still live in primitive, cave-like dwellings that are quite out of the ordinary and well worth a visit.

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Five years ago, I visited Sperlinga, a town in the interior of Sicily that is famous for its cave dwellings, and this week I had an opportunity to visit Matera, a fascinating small city in Basilicata that is famous for its sassi cave dwellings, and Alberobello, a unique town in Puglia with some 1,500 trulli, small, primitive homes with distinctive conical tiled roofs. Both places are UNESCO World Heritage sites and major tourist destinations but are nonetheless well worth a visit.

%Gallery-155508%Matera’s sassi are considered one of the oldest inhabited human settlements in the world. The town’s earthy stone buildings give it a biblical feel that inspired Mel Gibson to film part of “The Passion of the Christ” in Matera. (Most of it was filmed in an abandoned town nearby called Cracovecchia.) Only about 3,000 of the city’s 60,000 residents still live in sassi, but as recently as the 1950s more than half the town’s population was living in them, many in desperate poverty.

These days the sassi are big business, and if you have the cash, you can stay in a very nice one, complete with Wi-Fi, luxury bathrooms and memory foam beds – a far cry from the wretched living conditions chronicled by the writer Carlo Levi, whose writing galvanized the Italian government to forcibly relocate some 15,000 of the sassi dwellers into modern apartment buildings in the late 1950s.

Alberobello is a smaller town, filled with souvenir shops, and the distinctive trulli homes, which have eight different rooftop symbols. Many of the trulli have symbols painted on them, some with Christian symbols, some are primitive and others pertain to magic and the occult. While Matera has several ancient cave churches with stunning frescoes, the only real site in Alberobello is the town itself, which is well worth a visit, as is the surrounding countryside, which is also filled with trulli.

If you go: Matera can be reached by the regional FSE line from Lecce or the FAL train line in about 90 minutes from Bari, a Ryan Air and German Wings hub. I stayed at the Residence San Giorgio and highly recommend it. The nearby town of Altamura is famous for its focaccia bread, but the bakers in Matera have copied their recipes and you can sample some of the best tomato focaccia bread you’ll ever have at Panificio Paoluccio, located just off the main square in the new town at 22 Via Del Corso.
We visited Alberobello on a day trip from the seaside town of Polignano A Mare. You can rent a trulli if you want to sleep in the town, but most visitors don’t stay in Alberobello for more than a night, as it’s mostly geared towards day-trippers from Bari and other nearby towns. If you don’t have a car, you can arrive via regional train from Bari or Lecce. The nearby town of Locorotondo is also well worth a visit.

Photos and Videos by Dave Seminara

High-Five Prank In Pisa, Italy (VIDEO)

by Libby Zay on

Every tourist who visits Pisa, Italy, returns with a photo pretending to hold up the city’s famous bell tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Creating the photo illusion is so popular, that hoards of tourists flock to the town for the sole purpose of snapping the picture. One visitor, however, took it upon himself to walk around the square surrounding the tower and prank unsuspecting tourists. While they stood with arms outstretched, he snuck in, doling out one high-five after another. Watch above to see their surprised reactions.

Experiencing The Beautiful Game In Italy

by Dave Seminara on

I’d just been hit with a plastic bottle of water square on the back, but I was pretty sure it was nothing personal. But moments later, when I was pelted again, I started to wonder. Another minute passed and two thugs with tattoos on their thick necks ended the suspense with a blunt, intimidating message.

Thug number one barked at me in Italian and when I protested that I didn’t understand, his colleague menacingly chimed in.

“No photos!” barked thug #2.

“Get out,” cried thug #1, grabbing my wrist forcefully, and directing me out of Lecce’s Ultra fan zone.

It was my first time watching a live soccer match in Italy’s Serie A, the country’s most exalted soccer league, and I’d been unceremoniously ousted from the curva nord, the wildest nook of Lecce’s Stadio Via Del Mare for taking photos of “Ultras” the team’s most fervent, some would say thuggish, supporters. I found the informal expulsion bizarre considering I took just a few wide-angle shots with dozens of fans in each frame and no close ups.

For reasons I now can’t fathom, I found myself reaching into my wallet looking for a business card. I handed it to the hooligan on my left, because he looked like he might have just been released from prison for something like armed robbery, whereas the man on my right looked like he’d probably taken a life or two at some point. Thug #2 held my card in his large, bear-like paw for a few moments, studying it as though it were an important ancient text.

“We don’t care about this,” he said. “You go now.”He didn’t have to ask twice. I made a beeline back to the safety of a small group of equally passionate but far friendlier Lecce supporters who had taken me under their wing earlier in the game. When I told Eugenio and Mimmo, my new friends who had their own informal supporters club called UDB, that the Ultras weren’t fond of me taking their photos, they weren’t surprised.

We were standing in the curva nord, the equivalent of end zone seats, terraces in U.K. vernacular, and while the rest of the cavernous, half-full stadium was relatively quiet, with Lecce down 1-0 to Fiorentina, our section was alive in song, derisive chants and, well, anarchy. Some of the Ultras rolled and smoked joints, drank from airplane-size bottles of Smirnoff smuggled into the stadium in ingenious hiding places, and protected their turf from fans like me who clearly didn’t belong.

You might not like soccer, but if you’ve never been to a big-time match in Italy or other parts of the continent, where the sport is a religion, you’ve missed out on a truly vital part of the culture.

Outside the stadium, security was tight. In order to buy a ticket, fans have to show their photo I.D. and known troublemakers are barred. A phalanx of security guards checked the photo I.D.’s again upon entry and fans are frisked on the way in. But once fans step onto the terraces, they’re left to police themselves for the most part.

Fans can only enter the stadium for the specific section they’re ticketed for, and high spikey fencing separates the sections. The section for visiting fans resembles a giant cage. I was originally ticketed for a normal seat, but decided to exit the stadium and buy another ticket when I saw how much fun the Ultras were having in the curva.

In Italy’s Serie A, the bottom three teams are relegated at the end of the season to Serie B, which is a bit like a Major League Baseball team being sent down to compete in the minor leagues. Lecce entered Saturday night’s contest with Fiorentina third from the bottom and needing a win in order to have a realistic hope of staying in Serie A next season. The stakes were even higher than usual for Lecce, because the team is up for sale, and its owner, Giovanni Semeraro, stands to make millions more on the sale if the team remains in Serie A.

Lecce was miserable in the first half of the season but made up some ground of late with a string of solid performances. Nonetheless, team management lowered the price of the terrace seats from 12 euros to 5 in recent weeks in order to stoke interest in the team’s fledgling campaign. On this night, the team looked completely lost in the first half, as Fiorentina jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the thirty-fifth minute when Alessio Cerci barreled in alone and buried a low shot in the corner of the net. After scoring, Fiorentina seemed content to play defense and hang on.

But it hardly seemed to matter in the curva, as the Ultras sang and partied throughout the match. Eugenio translated a few of the songs for me and here’s a rough translation of one of my favorites.

Danger if you come into Salento
Be ware of the Ultras from Lecce
Every day here in St. Martin’s Day (The Patron Saint of Wine)
We come from the south of Italy
And we love our red wine
I will always be from Salento

As the second half wore on, the fans grew more and more frustrated as Lecce blew one chance after another. Fans denounced the players from both teams using a derogatory slang term to describe sex workers, and the referees were accused of being incorrigibly corrupt criminals. But their most spiteful chant was reserved for Semeraro, the team owner. Over and over again, they urged him to go forth and multiply without the benefit of a sex partner.

The team was still down just 1-0, but the Salentini were so disorganized that the one goal margin felt insurmountable. In the seventy-second minute, the fans finally found something to cheer about, as a Fiorentina player toppled a photographer, knocking him out cold, and prompting howls of gleeful laughter from the fans.

I asked Giovanni, another fan I met, what the highlight of the year had been so far, and he said the best moment had come a few weeks before when Andrea Masiello, a defender from Lecce’s rival, Bari, was arrested after admitting that he purposely scored on his own goalie during a game last year against Lecce, after being paid €50,000 by a Macedonian gangster, who was plotting to keep Lecce, which was on the verge of relegation to Serie B, up in Serie A.

But Eugenio didn’t agree with this sentiment.

“We hate Bari, but I took no pleasure in this,” he said. “I was at the game and I thought it was an honest mistake – not a criminal act. It’s a shame, an embarrassment for Italy.”

The relegation system creates high stakes at the bottom of the table each year. Lecce has been neck and neck with Genoa, which is fourth from the bottom of the table and Genoa’s fanatical fans actually managed to halt a game last week, as fans threatened the players, who were down 4-0, and forced all but one of them to relinquish their jerseys, as they deemed them unfit to wear them. As a punishment for this farce, the team has to play its final two games at home in an empty stadium with no fans.

Craziness is not unusual in Italian football. Fiorentina’s coach had recently been dismissed for slapping one of his players.

Lecce failed to equalize against Fiorentina and the 1-0 loss means that Lecce will go down to Serie B next season unless they win their final match next week and Genoa loses. I asked Memo and Eugenio if it might not be better to be a successful Serie B team rather than a very bad Serie A one but they both rejected this logic.

“Being in Serie A is about pride for us,” Eugenio said. “We get recognition, and it’s good for tourism too. We want to be in the top league, but now, well, we’re going down for sure.”

As the final whistle blew, the red and yellow clad Lecce squad collapsed in exhaustion on the field. After all the expletives, I half expected the Ultras to storm the field and lynch the players, but instead, they gave the fans a rousing ovation for their effort.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “They lost.”

“This is the most beautiful thing,” Eugenio said. “The team has tried so hard, we need to salute them.”

Before I knew it, the fans were singing again. Their team hadn’t scored a goal and were surely about to be relegated to the minor leagues, but there were still good times to be had. That is, until the fans decided to remind Semeraro to asexually reproduce on his way home from the game.

On the way out of the stadium, I had a hard time finding the bus stop to get back to my rented apartment and a family whom I approached for directions told me to hop in for a ride. Ms. Orme insisted that I sit up front with her husband, Alessandro, as she piled into the back seat with their two young daughters. I was amazed at how trusting they were; I could have been an axe murderer, a Fiorentina fan, or even an Ultra.

Alessandro explained the fans’ hatred for Giovanni Semeraro, the team’s owner.

“They are, how do you say it, not caro (expensive), but..”

“Cheap,” I interjected, thinking that the Salentini fans had a lot in common with many of the American sports franchises I follow.

“Exactly, cheap,” he said.

But that display of hospitality turned out to be just a precursor for what came next. The day after the game, I was invited to join the Facebook group of UDB, Universita Della Balaustra, (roughly translates as the University of the Terraces) the informal supporters club my new friends were part of.

Before I knew it, I was being welcomed as the group’s first stranieri (foreigner) and it dawned on me that groups like UDB are what I love about soccer. In Italy, and in many other parts of the world, the sport inspires strong passions but it also fosters a sense of community and shared experience.

Lecce might never finish at the top of the Serie A but it doesn’t matter, because the joy is in going to the games, demonstrating pride not just in the team but in the region and in being one of the gang. For one night, I was part of Italy’s beautiful game in Lecce, and thanks to Facebook, I’m now an honorary Salentini supporter. And the next time I make it to a match, I’ll know to leave my camera at home.

A Few Thoughts On Italian Fashion

by Dave Seminara on

It’s 85 degrees outside and even hotter inside the train carriage, but a young Italian couple dressed in layers – shirts, sweaters, jackets and scarves – is adamant about keeping their windows sealed tight despite the lack of air conditioning. A poet from New Zealand named Gerry is dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, as am I, and we’re roasting. We want the windows open; they want them closed. It’s unclear if they don’t want the wind to ruffle their hair, or if they’re not as hot as we are, but the cultural difference is clear.

Italians dress for the season, not for the weather at hand, so I amused myself last week as the mercury soared near the 90 degree mark watching Italians continue to dress in what could be considered winter or spring attire. Every time I saw someone all bundled up in a down coat and scarf, despite the heat, I’d feel the need to point them out to my wife. “Look at that guy,” I’d say. “It’s in the 80’s and he’s wearing a down coat!”

Even men in uniform get in on the act. I’ve seen both soldiers and train conductors wearing colorful scarves coiled tightly around their necks despite the heat. They look cool but it makes no sense to me. Who would want a scarf tied tightly around their neck like a noose on an 85-degree day? Italian men, that’s who. The scarf-wearing soldier was also brandishing a man purse – try pulling that look off in the United States Marine Corps and you might end up in Guantanamo.Children are bundled even more, especially babies. I saw one baby swaddled in so many blankets that it looked ready to join Roland Amundson’s North Pole Expedition, despite the 80-degree weather. North Americans, particularly cold weather people like me (I’m from Buffalo), have a different sense of warmth but fashion obviously plays a role as well.

Most Italians don’t use dryers, so all you have to do is walk through a neighborhood on a sunny day to see people’s wardrobes hanging on clotheslines for all to see. They like to dress in layers and they usually look good, if uncomfortable. North Americans place more of a premium on comfort. Sure, we might go out in sweat pants, or, God forbid, pajamas, but by God, while we might not look great, we will feel good.

This past weekend in Assisi, it was fascinating to see Italians and foreign tourists mingling together on the same streets. Americans looked ready for the beach; Italians the ski slopes. At one point, we were waiting for a bus in an unforgivingly sunny spot with no shade, and I was standing near a man wearing a button-down shirt, a sweater and a down jacket totally zipped up. He wasn’t a terrorist concealing a bomb; he was just an ordinary Italian bundled up for a sunny, 85-degree day. Dressing for summer in April is like ordering a cappuccino after 10 a.m. or having pizza AND pasta – it simply isn’t done in Italy.

I can understand some Italian but I don’t speak the language. That’s a shame, because I wanted to grab the man by his down coat, shake him, and say, “Good lord, man, what on earth is wrong with you! It feels like July out here, why are you all bundled up?”

Aside from the layered, season-yes, current conditions-no approach, Italian men also wear their clothes at least a size or two smaller than North American men might. I’ve also seen the odd Italian youth sporting the baggy, have a look at my underwear jeans, but for every one of them, there are 100 holdouts that like ’em tight.

Thankfully, younger Italian men seem to be moving away from the skimpy, tight speedo bathing suits at the beach, but older Italian men are still into this look. On the facial hair front, designer beards seem to be in, ditto for prominent, chunky glasses, man purses and brightly colored apparel with brand names.

And despite all the cultural differences, you still see quite a few Italians wearing outfits bearing the Stars and Stripes, and, even more common, the Playboy logo. Here’s hoping that the weather in Italy will become more spring-like, so the poor Italians don’t have to sweat it out in their spring clothing until the calendar tells them it’s time to get comfortable.

[Photos by ЕленАндреа and Elmo H. Love on Flickr]