4 Lecce Churches and a Tower

After lunch today I visited four Lecce churches and a bell tower associated with one of those churches, the Lecce Duomo.

Lecce is lousy with churches. My guidebook lists six and I think there are more.

So why did I pick the churches I went to this afternoon? Well, for one thing, they are four of the six churches listed in my guidebook. For another, there’s a fee to enter them, but you can buy a ticket that gets you into all four, along with the Duomo’s bell tower. The ticket is sold under the title, “The Baroque Tour in Lecce.” Baroque is a big thing in the old town of Lecce.

I bought the ticket, so how could I not go to all of them?

The ticket also includes a museum. I might go another day. The ticket is good for two weeks.

Duomo Bell Tower

I started with not one of the Lecce churches but with the Duomo’s bell tower. I figured, why not get up high, look around, and have a belated introduction to the wider Lecce?

The bell tower is, viewed from the outside, a five-tiered structure, but it’s the equivalent of seven stories tall. I know this because it has an elevator, not stairs to the top. There are floors numbered zero through six on the panel in the elevator.

Only zero and six have buttons associated with them. The other numbers all have key slots beside them.

The elevator is glass-walled. There are narrow, grated metal catwalks on the intermediate floors. My acrophobia did not regret in the least not being able to visit those levels.

At the top …

No, I’m going to back up a bit.

At the ground level, the weather was very pleasant. It was mild, the sun shone brightly, and there was just a slight breeze. I walked around Lecce in a short-sleeved shirt and was quite comfortable even when walking in the shade of the buildings. And in the full sun I would have been too warm in a long-sleeved shirt, let alone a jacket.

(That having been said, most of the locals wore light jackets. And some wore jackets that were more substantial than could be rightly classified as light. Apparently, southern Italy people’s constitutions are not the same as my Canadian constitution.)

Back to my regularly scheduled narrative.

At the top of the tower, the building wind blustered viciously. I was quite uncomfortably cold.

How there could be such a difference in conditions only seven stories up is a mystery to me. The only thing I can think of is the bell tower is attached to the duomo. Maybe God knows that I’m an unrepentant atheist and was upset that I was up in his tower, closer to him than I would have been on the ground.

From up top, I learned something about Lecce that I didn’t know before. Unlike the other cities I’ve visited on this trip, all of the land radiating out from Lecce in all directions is flat.

Maybe it’s just my imperfect vision, but the only rises in the landscape I saw in the panoramas from the four sides of the bell tower were buildings.

Oh, by the way, the protection against falling at the top of the bell tower was sufficient to keep my acrophobia at bay.

Lecce Churches: The Duomo

Enough with the high places. I started my tour of Lecce churches with the duomo, aka the cathedral.

If my recollection of my past trips in Italy is accurate (never a good bet), the Lecce Duomo has a smaller footprint than other Italian duomos* I’ve seen. But Lecce’s duomo doesn’t skimp on height.

* If it’s not Italian, it’s not a duomo. It’s just a sparkling cathedral.

The duomo is cross-shaped, with the bar of the cross abutting the small altar area.

A series of small stained glass windows are positioned in the walls a little below the ceiling, distributed fairly uniformly around the cross shape of the church.

Paintings adorn the ceiling.

Along the side walls, chapels with little depth to them are elaborately decorated. Chapels on the ends of the side aisles have roughly the same depth as the altar area, That is, deeper than the side chapels, but still not very deep.

A crypt lies under the duomo. Multiple signs forbid taking pictures there.

The crypt has lots of pillars that are simple grey cylinders except for stone carvings at their top. The carvings are different on each pillar.

Lecce Churches: Chiesa di San Matteo

The Chiesa di San Matteo is on the small side. It has large statues on pedestals in front of all the pillars that line the side walls.

It has extremely shallow side chapels. In them, there’s the stone, or is it plaster, equivalent of filigree decorating non-supporting columns. Each side chapel has a painting on the wall, except for two that have a statue. And all of those chapels have lots of small statuary, along with a small painting, near their arched tops.

It’s a nice church and not overly colourful.

Lecce Churches: Chiesa di Santa Chiara

Chiesa di Santa Chiara is the smallest of the Lecce churches I visited this afternoon. It had a distinctively musty scent to it.

The side chapel designs are similar to those in the Chiesa di San Matteo, overwrought and shallow.

The footprint of the church is an octagon with unequal sides. The six sides at the front and back — three at each end — look equal, but the side walls are somewhat longer.

Lecce Churches: Basilica di Santa Croce

Basilica di Santa Croce is, with a caveat below, my favourite of the four Lecce churches I saw today.

Its most fun part is its facade. The sculptors who decorated it went crazy.

The facade displays a cornucopia of statues of a variety of different animals, real and imagined (think dragons), cherubs, and men and women. Some of the women are bare-breasted. What’s up with that? This is a church. A lot of old churches in Italy won’t allow modern-day women to enter with sleeveless tops. But here they’ve got topless statues?

I’ll include a series of somewhat zoomed-in pictures of that facade below.

Inside, there’s a central nave and two side aisles. The columns that separate the nave from the side aisles have intricate stone carvings at their tops.

Chapels line the walls of the side aisles. These are a little deeper than the ones at Chiesa di San Matteo and Chiesa di Santa Chiara. Again, there are paintings in each of the side chapels, I took a picture of one and included it here because, to me, it looked like the subject was looking up at God and saying, “Oh, God. What did I ever do to deserve such tsuris?” Although, he probably didn’t say tsuris. He probably said the local language equivalent of “troubles.” That tickled my fancy.

I said there was a caveat to my favouriting the Basilica di Santa Croce. Here it is. What did they have to do to build it? They had to first expel the Jewish families who were living there. That’s what. <sarcasm font>Well, isn’t that just swell.</sarcasm font>

I hope you’ve had enough of Lecce churches for now because that’s it for today.

Close-ups of a few of the sculptures on the Basilica di Santa Croce facade: