The effect is due to the fortuitous combination of a stone and a style. Pietra leccese is a calcareous rock, tough enough to build with, resistant to time and rain, but apparently very easy to sculpt and carve. The style, needless to say, is baroque, a style that thrives on an extravagance of sculpted ornamentation, a wilful excess of fuss and flourish, as if no abundance could ever be enough for the act of worship involved in building a church, for, as always in Italy, it is the churches that make the city centre what it is.
This rock, then, and this architectural style were made for each other. The sculptors could sculpt to their heart’s delight. The facades of Lecce’s churches simply froth with cherubs and roses, laurels and angels’ wings, saints, columns, scrolls, gargoyles, the whole gamut of mythical animals. But there is something else, too. All these stony frills come not in the lava black of Catania’s baroque, or the stuccoed facades of other southern churches, but in the most delicate yellowish white, for that is the colour of pietra leccese, a colour that takes on luminous depth from its surface roughness, soaking up the light, so that the lavishly fashioned stone assumes the glow and dapple of pale yellow roses in low sunshine.
A FEW MINUTES’ WALK from the station, one leaves ordinary urban streets behind and enters a maze, not of narrow alleys, as in Crotone or Taranto, but stately piazzas, whose odd geometry combined with the hypnotic pulse of so many baroque facades can soon have you absolutely disorientated. You give up trying to work out quite where you are and just wander into and out of one astonishing church after another, where it is never this or that single artwork that amazes, but the avalanche of it all, the candles and canvases, coloured marbles and carved pulpits, tombs, madonnas, organ pipes, banners, bas-relief, white and gold ceilings seething with saints and cherubs.
Small towns like this will have at most a couple of railway stations. How could they need more? But it seems there is simply no end to the number of churches, major churches, that an Italian town can accommodate. Who maintains them? Who can ever keep track of what’s in them? The Duomo di Maria Santissima Assunta, the Chiesa di Sant’Irene dei Teatini, the Basilica di Santa Croce, the Chiesa del Gesù, the Basilica di San Giovanni Battista al Rosario (even their names are too much), the Chiesa di Santa Chiara, Chiesa del Carmine, Chiesa di San Matteo, Chiesa dei Santi Niccolò e Cataldo. All these major churches can be found in a restricted space of a few piazzas and sunstruck streets. There are many others. It seems that in the seventeenth century, with Lecce now part of the Kingdom of Naples, governed at the time by the Spanish Aragons, a determined attempt was made to transform the city into a centre of pious splendour; the main piazzas were turned into building sites for many decades, feeding an extensive industry of ecclesiastical supplies. At the same time, with the Turks still threatening from across the water, stout city walls were built with splendid gates, which again had the shape and feel of baroque facades. Often what older churches there were in the town were revamped to fit the new style. The result is that Lecce has a homogeneous grace that is unusual even in Italy. Only the hundred-foot-high column topped with the statue of Sant’Oronzo, the city’s patron saint who miraculously turned away the plague in 1656, jars a little, built as it was by putting two old Roman columns carved from white marble on top of each other. Somehow it just doesn’t fit.
Alternating orange juice and espressos between the various monuments, I finally tackled the Duomo, which dominates a simply huge piazza, three of whose sides form a broad canyon of glowing yellow stone. Eager to escape the sun, I pushed through the heavy curtains at the door, wandered around the aisles a while and then, suddenly feeling I’d seen enough for one day, settled down on a hard seat to rest. I have always liked to sit and look and listen in Italian churches; they are so different from the churches my father preached in, where people came for the main services, matins and evensong, and that was it. Here in Lecce, quite apart from the tourists, there was a constant trickle of the faithful, renewing their prayers and superstitions, a constant soft muttering and shuffling of respectful feet on marble paving, in the lush loftiness of ornamented altars and countless candelabra.
I closed my eyes. After a while, a rosary recital began. Apparently it was coming from a side chapel to my left; voices losing themselves in the hypnotic rhythms of the rosary. I listened, trying to share the experience the worshippers were presumably enjoying, until very gradually I became aware that the voice leading the prayers was … recorded.
No! It couldn’t be. But yes, it was.
I sat up. There was definitely that metallic ring of a fairly amateur recording. Amazingly, in all this enormous and unsparingly lavish church, they didn’t have a priest around to lead the ritual, just a flatly recorded chant:
Ave, Maria, piena di grazia,
il Signore è con te.
Tu sei benedetta fra le donne,
e benedetto è il frutto del tuo seno, Gesù.
The electronic voice droned on, with pauses, empty of all the pathos we normally feel when the individual will submits to the collective rote. And in fact no sooner had I realised it was recorded than I couldn’t even pretend to succumb to it. Instead, I found myself comparing it with the electronic announcements in those stations whose capistazione have long been pensioned off together with all their underlings. Endlessly repeated, the voice comes from far
