Seeing as I have about eight hours of train travel ahead of me, I might as well try to get caught up to today. Somewhere along the line, I seem to have lost a day somehow (my photos say it's day 9), but well, that's Italy!
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| Time flies, as they say, and you can see the symbols for it on the sides of the entry to the monumental cemetery in Lecce |
I'm leaving Lecce for Castellammare di Stabia (Roman ruins!) but I also feel like I'm leaving a new family behind, having met and really "Grokked" (a sci-fi term from Robert Heinlein meaning to understand thoroughly) these fellow travelers on the path of pattern, ornament, and art. It's so nice to be in a group where the word "acanthus" doesn't send them scrambling for a dictionary. It was also nice to be in such a multinational group; we had travelers from the US, Japan, Spain, Norway, England and Ireland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Ukraine, and of course, Italy. It feels as though I have just expanded my (art) family by about tenfold.
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| Part of our multilingual mass milling around before a group photo |
Back to travelogue- after a decent night's sleep (though I don't seem to be able to get more than about five hours on any night!) I had breakfast and said goodbye to some of the participants who were dispersing for various parts, did a bit of writing and travel planning for today, then got one of the free bikes from the hotel and set out. Lecce is a perfect town for a bike- flat as a pancake and generally smooth streets, though you do have to watch out for cars and buses and people walking along buried in their phones.
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| There are dozens of "streets" like this in the cemetery in Lecce. Absolutely incredible! |
My first stop was the cemetery very close to the hotel, which we had seen before but not managed to find open. I was glad I had the bike, since the entrance allee of Italian cypress trees was long. There was a large piazza in front of one of the baroque churches that cover all of Lecce, and then the cemeteries branched off on both sides. They were immense, with large family monuments all made of the butter colored Lecce stone, planted liberally with cypress, pines, and oleanders. It was enchanting- I was the only one there save for a few cats, and the architecture and stone work were both excellent. It didn't seem extremely old- mostly 19th century in the parts I explored, but the contrast to the newer sections was stark. The modern monuments had no warmth at all- they generally didn't even use the local stone, opting instead for gray and white marbles, with tinted windows and metal accents, looking more like miniature office buildings than monuments to a family's history.
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| About as much charm as a refrigerator! |
I wandered around in there for quite a while, did a drawing of one of them, unsuccessfully tried to lure a kitten out for a picture, got some water, and then headed back over to town on the bike, where i just meandered through the old streets without a map, stopping to take a few pictures outside some churches and trying not to hit anything due to the crummy brakes on the bike.
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| Took a lot of accidental selfies on the bike as I was cruising |
Eventually I found myself down in the opposite corner from the hotel, where there is an art and archeology museum that was again completely empty except for me. I went in (free!) and a guard ushered me up to the third floor, where they had a very good display of ancient history of the area, with ceramics going back over 5,000 years! I was left alone in there with a collection that would make the Getty quite happy, with multiple examples of many classic styles displayed with good information, unostentatiously. In another corner of the museum I found the Pinacoteca (picture gallery), where again I was alone- the guard turned the lights on just for me! They had one gallery of art from the Renaissance to the 18th century, and another with 19th and 20th. Not many names I recognized, other than a piece by Giuseppe de Ribera, but there were some very nice pieces, including an awesome cabinet covered with little dwarf genre paintings, some very nice majolica, and a curious statue of a putto covered with netting. Not sure what that was about, but it looked cool!
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| 19th c. ceramic sculpture. Ummmm? |
Hit the road again to find some food, stopping briefly by a couple of grand old houses that were for sale along one of the busy streets. I pictured how pleasant it must have been when the only traffic there was clip-clopping horses, and how now you would need to put in triple insulated glass to really make it hospitable. Too bad, because I bet you could get them for a good price, and some of them had very nice sgraffito and decorations. I would have loved to at least had a chance to see what the interiors look like. Found some food, returned to the hotel and did some scribbling and more trip planning, and finished the day in the hotel restaurant with the rapidly dwindling crew from the exhibition. Packed up my gear late and went to bed for a few hours.
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| Sold! Can you wrap it up to go? |
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