Driving to the tip of Italy

 

Italy's rocky Adriatic Coast along the "heel"

Yesterday, we drove from our farm hotel, Masseria Montenapoleone, to Otranto, far south on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, then on around the heel of the boot of Italy to Gallipoli.  We disobeyed Google Maps and its insistence on sending us on the “better” roads, and found a beautiful back road that hugged the coastline.  This took us high on clifftops overlooking the Adriatic, through summer towns completely closed for the winter, with second-home villas dug into the limestone mountainsides, and to Santa Maria di Leuca at the far tip of the heel where the Adriatic and Ionian Seas come together.

 

beach at Santa Maria di Leuca

Masseria Napoleone, our farm hotel in Puglia

 

 We tried to stay along the coast road up the west side   of the heel, but the road became increasingly   impassable and finally collapsed in front of a barrier   barring further travel.  Surprisingly, the streets in the   little coastal villages west of Santa Maria di Leuca   were in terrible shape, barely drivable because of   their huge potholes and loose gravel.  This, despite                                                                                     the elegant villas that filled the towns and lined the                                                                                     water.

A powerful thunderstorm doused us with rain and filled the sky with intense lightning.  The rain was so heavy, we couldn’t hear the thunder.  I kept looking out at the dark, churning Mediterranean Sea, thinking how terrifying it must seem to African immigrants fleeing poverty and violence only to be loaded onto tiny boats presumably taking them to Italy, but often left adrift as the people clinging to them hope for rescue. 

rocky cove along the Adriatic

Though we investigated several restaurants that said they were open, everything was closed except for a fish market at one locked up café and Mama Mia, a blue and white restaurant above a tiny marina in one small village.  There we had excellent seafood salads and fresh bread, helped out in our menu choice by a couple and their baby, the only other patrons.

Our first stop was in Otranto, now a seaside town and port, with a gruesome history.  Otranto was the site of the Greek city of Hydrus, then became a Roman city, a Norman port and, in 1480, the unfortunate victim of an Ottoman invasion.  The Ottomans slaughtered all the men, leaving only 10,000 of the 22,000 inhabitants alive, enslaving 5000 of those who survived.  They left a year later, driven off by the King of Naples.  The current fortress was built after the Ottomans left.

 

Otranto fortress

 South and west of Otranto, the Sea is a gorgeous   turquoise, shading, on this stormy day, to a dark   gray- blue.  The strong wind sent turquoise and   white waves frothing into the cliffs and coves.  On   the west side of the heel, the land slopes more gently   to the Sea, but is still all limestone and cactus.  The   beaches are stones, not sand, and don’t look like a   comfortable place to spread your beach towel.

2000 year old olive tree

In this part of Italy, an economic and ecological catastrophe is underway.  Large olive orchards cover the hills and plains of the region.  But as we drove along the back roads, we could see that thousands of acres of olive trees were dead.  A bacteria is killing the trees, some of which are several thousand years old, huge, gnarly and very productive.  Some farmers are cutting off the enormous dead trunks and letting stems grow from the roots, hoping to keep the characteristics of their olive oil through growing new trees from the old roots.  But, these will take a decade before they produce the volume and quality of olives that the ancient giants produced.