Italy - Salento and the "Barocco Leccese"

The Salento peninsula in South-Eastern Puglia extends, between the Adriatic and the Ionian Seas, from the last hills of Murgia to the headland, Capo Santa Maria di Leuca, and its celebrated homonymous sanctuary, marking Finibus Terrae, which was probably built over the ruins of an ancient temple dedicated to Minerva. The Salento peninsula is prevalently calcareous, with a typically Karstic landscape, not rich in surface waters, featuring a profusion of underground craters, caves and grottoes. In the course of the centuries, the landscape was moulded in turn by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Normans and Aragonese as this borderland acquired increasing strategic and commercial importance. Each and every domination deeply affected the peninsula's landscape and the identity of these ancient builders can be traced both in the countryside and in all the towns. Dry walls, menhirs, dolmen, sighting promontories (the so-called specchie) and underground oil-mills are the most ancient evidence left by the Messapian people, an Illyrian-speaking population that settled in the Salento peninsula in the first millennium BC; after constant warfare with the Greek colony in Taranto, they were conquered by the Romans in 266 AD. The Messapians occupied a vast territory, known as Grecia Salentina, where traces of the ancient road network are still visible. This territory's extension was gradually reduced and now includes eight municipalities where there is a revival of the ancient local language, griko. Ancient cathedrals, stately homes, castles and watchtowers are marks of Norman (11th and 12th centuries) and Aragonese (13 and 15th centuries) occupation. These significantly altered the medieval social and political structures, but the peninsula's landscape is also the product of the peasants' daily toil as, for centuries, they unwearyingly laboured an impervious and rocky soil, dotting the countryside with caseddì, the distinctive tool sheds built with rocks cleared from the ground. The most typical feature of this agrarian culture are the tenant farms, born of the fragmentation of large landed estates, and equally distributed throughout the territory. Ever since the Middle Ages, the system based on tenant farms reflects the economical structure - ownership, cultivation and tenure of the land - that remained unchanged up to the 1950's. The architecture of these farms varies from modest country houses to properly fortified manors for the defence of inland regions. Around the second half of the 13th century, authority began to be displayed also in rural areas and some of these edifices were enriched with elaborate porticoes, balconies, belvederes, formal gardens stucco decorations and frescoes and became small gems of architecture.