Salerno to Lecce

Reader warning: Despite not landing anywhere today with much time to explore the locale (although unexpectedly having enough time after my day of travel to wander a bit in Lecce, my stop for the next few days, before dinner), this post will be long. Prepare yourself with snacks and a preemptory toilet break as required.

My current adventure within Southern Italy involves two hellish travel days and two purgatorial travel days. Today is the first hellish one, from Salerno to Lecce. One purgatory travel day was yesterday, from Sorrento to Salerno. The other hellish and purgatorial days are still to come.

Just to be clear, I consider any travel that includes one connection to be purgatory. No matter how long of a connection time I have, I fret with extreme prejudice that something will go wrong. The first leg will be delayed longer than my transfer time. I’ll get so hopelessly lost or confused with the connection procedures in the station/port/airport, particularly if the arrival and departure points are different, that I will miss my connection despite the first leg being on time. Or any unimaginable number of other things that could go wrong.

To the best of my recollection, that — a missed connection because of a late first flight — has only ever happened to me once. But any of those problems absolutely could easily happen again. And I’m always entirely certain that my current or next travel day will be the one. Until it isn’t

Hell is two or more connections.

Just to be clear, I labelled yesterday’s trip from Sorrento to Salerno by two separate ferries as purgatory solely because of the connection. The late first leg causing a nail-biting connection time notwithstanding, the voyage was quite pleasant, with the ferries chugging along past beautiful scenery. It turned out, much to my surprise, to not be bad.

As the march of time advances relentlessly, and I’m able to look at a journey retrospectively, if everything proceeds reasonably close to plan, I might realize that the reality of the trip was not as hellish or purgatorial as I feared it would be. However, I’m loath to change my initial classification of it as hellish or purgatorial. I quickly become set in my ways. Changing my categorization of it would upset the natural order.

Besides, you can’t undo the angst I felt before and during the trip about possible connection mishaps. Nor is there any way to prevent me from feeling it every time now and in the future.

You might say, “But, Joel, there’s no point in worrying about a possible future negative event that you can’t control. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Worrying just makes you miserable whether or not it happens, without making it any better if it does.”

You’re absolutely right, oh wise one. Now, if you can provide me with a reliable technique that will stop me from worrying about that sort of thing, a technique that’s implementable given my innate nervous nature, I’ll promote you from wise one to sage. No one other than you and I will recognize that promotion. But, hopefully, it will make you feel better about yourself, unfortunately at the risk of it increasing your smugness.

I labelled the hellish travel day yet to come as hellish solely because of the two connections it will have. But the combined train and connection times are scheduled to be shorter than today’s. So it doesn’t look as bad. As superstitious people would say, knock on wood. All hell could break loose. You never know.

Salerno to Lecce’s Three Trains

Getting from Salerno to Lecce requires three trains and, therefore, two connections: Salerno to Taranto, Taranto to Brindisi, and Brindisi to Lecce. Hence, by my official classification rules, the Salerno to Lecce trip is hellish.

If memory serves, I could have done it with just one connection, but not much less total journey time, if I was willing to start at an ungodly hour of the morning. Despite being an ungodly person, it was far too early for me. I don’t think even God wakes up that early. I’d need a large intravenous caffeine drip to keep me going through the day.

An extensive web search did not turn up any places in Salerno, on the train, or at either of the connection points where I could get that caffeine drip.

I think of this Salerno to Lecce day as the halfway point of my broader trip. By the calendar, if I counted correctly, it’s the first day of the second half of the trip. But I’m in Italy for more than 20 days, so I might have miscounted.

But I also mentally split this trip into two geographical halves. The first half started in the shin of Italy and travelled down the western side of the ankle and the top of the foot, from Rome to Sorrento, with a stop in Naples in between.

The second half will start in the stiletto heel of Italy and work its way up the eastern side of the heel and ankle and then back to Rome on the shin to catch my plane home. The journey from Salerno to Lecce bridges the gap between those two geographical halves.

While planning this trip, I spent hours scouring the website of Trenitalia, Italy’s primary train company, looking for options that would get me where I wanted to go without a hellish travel day. I tried reordering the stops in every possible way. I looked at dropping one or two of the stops that weren’t at the top of my list.

I then did the same exercise with Rome2Rio looking for other transportation options, including Italy’s few other train companies and other modes of travel.

Nothing worked. The route I’m following was the best I found.

So a hellish travel day, all on Trenitalia trains, it is for today. (I’m not saying Trenitalia trains are bad. I’ve usually found them to be quite good when they’re not on strike (as they were when I tried to take the express train from Fiumicino Airport into central Rome at the beginning of this trip). I’m just saying there are three of them today.)

Three trains and two connections, what could possibly go wrong?

Delayed Train

Well, one thing that could go wrong with my three-train journey from Salerno to Lecce would be a delayed train. While I was still in Rome I got an email from Trenitalia telling me, in Italian, that, due to a landslide on the line, one of today’s trains had to be rescheduled and would be running late. Fortunately, it is the last train of the day, from Brindisi to Lecce. Rather than a 21-minute connection in Brindisi, the new schedule put my second and last connection at more than an hour and a half. But at least it won’t cause me to miss a connection.

Actually, it wasn’t so much Trenitalia that told me that, but Google Translate. Seeing the email from Trenitalia and being able to recognize it was a problem with my trip sent me into an acute tizzy until I got the translation and learned that it would just delay my arrival in Lecce, not cancel the whole journey.

Trenitalia has a good English language version of its website. That’s what I used to book my tickets. And when it emailed me the tickets, the information accompanying the tickets PDF was in English. So they know I’m an anglophone. But the change information came to me only in Italian. Thank goodness for Google Translate. If it’s not worthy of a Nobel Prize then I don’t know what is.

While on the Salerno to Taranto train, Trenitalia sent me another email. Google Translate told me it said that, because of the rescheduling, the train number on the Brindisi to Lecce train is changing. However, the rescheduled times remain the same.

Salerno to Lecce, Part I: Salerno to Taranto

I like the idea of going to Taranto, if only to change trains, solely because of the name. It’s close to the name of my lifelong hometown, Toronto. I like Toronto, but a little vowel variety is nice too.

This first leg of the journey from Salerno to Lecce today is the longest, about three and a half hours. I bought a first-class ticket (there are two and only two classes on this particular train) that got me a pre-selected single seat in a car arranged with two seats on one side of the car and one on the other. And, I think, I got a touch more legroom than I would have gotten in second class. So I had a comfortable seat with a window view out one side of the train for the whole time.

The scenery on this leg was varied. It included, not in chronological order, bucolic greenery, rugged greenery, greenery that is neither bucolic nor rugged, brownery in some dried-out areas, farms, cows, sheep, hills, valleys, mountains, rivers, wind turbines, towns, villages, train stations, power lines, industrial areas, roads, bridges, and lots of dark tunnels. When the train got close to Taranto, the industrial areas intensified. There, it passed a very sizeable farm of structures that did an excellent job of impersonating large oil storage tanks. Although, it occurs to me that it might not have been a simulation, but rather actual oil storage tanks.

Except for the bleak tunnels and the ugly oil storage farm, it wasn’t an awful way to spend three and a half hours.

Furthermore, the long journey gave me a chance to do some reading, pull out my laptop, tether it to my phone, and type up the introductory sections of this post, as well as much of this section, while still leaving me plenty of time to gaze out the window now and then, and then and now.

Taking a decent picture through a slightly tinted, not entirely clean window on a train moving at quite high speed is not easy. By the time I pulled my phone out of my pocket to take a picture of a view I liked, the view was gone. But I did make a couple of attempts. I posted one here. However, until you get to the last section, this post will be short on pictures.

Salerno to Lecce, Part II: Taranto to Brindisi

The train from Salerno arrived in Taranto about five minutes late, but that still gave me a little over an hour before my next train on this epic/hellish journey from Salerno to Lecce.

Despite sitting in first-class, they didn’t serve food on the Salerno to Taranto train and I didn’t see any notice of a café car on the train. My train from Taranto to Brindisi has only second-class cars. The chance that they’ll serve food on that one is about zero-point-one percent of the chance of winning the grand jackpot on one of those super-big lotteries.

I was in the Taranto train station from about 1:00 to 2:00. My lunch came from a refrigerated vending machine in the waiting area. It consisted of a prosciutto and cheese sandwich and a small bag of Peanut M&Ms. The M&Ms were good. If I believed in prayer, I’d have prayed for my deliverance from the pretty much tasteless sandwich on literally and figuratively white bread.

And then it was time for the train.

A short piece out of Taranto, the train passed what, to my eyes, looked like an abundance of vineyards and olive groves. I’m reasonably certain my eyes weren’t deceived about the abundance, but I’m less sure they were olive trees and grape vines. I’m reasonably certain they weren’t petunias, though. (Hey, I’m not a horticulturist. How can you expect me to know these things?)

The train also passed a few other small farms. One had sheep, others had unknown produce. Unknown to me, that is. I’m sure the farmers have a good handle on that.

Most of the land along the way was fairly flat, which I suppose is what made it a good place to grow olives, grapes, and other produce. I’ve seen grapes grown on terraces up high, steep hills, but who wants to schlep the produce and equipment up and down those slopes if they don’t have to? Being a lazy person, flat land makes a lot of sense to me. Then again, being a lazy person, letting other people do those jobs makes even more sense to me. Hey, I don’t want to deprive them of their jobs. I’m generous that way.

On the other hand, sheep on hills are perfectly fine because the sheep can climb up and down the hills themselves, dammit.

The land wasn’t all entirely flat. There were some, I won’t say rolling hills as that would be something of an exaggeration. The land seemed to want to make a statement but was unable to deviate much from flatness.

Salerno to Lecce, Part III: Brindisi to Lecce

The train from Taranto to Brindisi arrived in Brindisi 11 minutes late. However, because of the above-noted train delay, that still left me with not much less than an hour and a half to catch my last train of the day in this Salerno to Lecce adventure.

Sometimes things don’t work out. Sometimes things proceed as planned. And other times things exceed expectations. My connection in Brindisi was the latter.

Because Trenitalia changed the train number on me, I went to the ticket window in Brindisi to ask the person there if she had to issue me a new ticket. She asked me if I wanted to get an earlier train instead. I said yes.

She offered me a train leaving in five minutes. I asked her if I could make it. “Si, si,” she said. But then she had trouble making the change on her computer and the departure time passed. The next train was only fifteen minutes later. She figured out her system and got me on that one.

That high-speed, nonstop train from Salerno to Lecce takes only 20 minutes. The journey was uneventful and not particularly interesting, although I saw more supposed olive groves and vineyards.

The train window was too dirty to take pictures out of it, so there I haven’t posted one for this leg of the journey from Salerno to Lecce. Sorry about that.

Lecce

Salerno to Lecce, I made it!

My hotel in Lecce is a small one, just six rooms in a former palazzo. It’s in the heart of Lecce’s centro storico (old town). When I checked in, the woman taking care of check-ins told me the best way to see the old town is to just get lost in the small streets.

Thanks to my getting an earlier train, I had time to do that before dinner. And that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t consult a map. I didn’t consult my guidebook. I just set out from the hotel and wandered aimlessly through the streets.

The old town is lovely. The old stone buildings are charming. And they’re mostly clean. I don’t know if they wash the walls regularly, or if they only ever did it once and I got lucky with the timing, but they aren’t showing any soot and grime stains now. There are a couple of small spots with a little graffiti, but not much.

I didn’t seek out any specific sights on my stroll, so that’s still to come, but I think I’m going to like Lecce.

I’m here for four nights, three full days. I might do a day trip from here. I tried to book one weeks ago for one day while I’m here, but after some back-and-forth emails with the company, they told me they aren’t going to be running it while I’m here because they don’t have any other customers on those days.

During my stroll, I stopped at a “tourist information” office (a seller of tours, tour books, and stuff). They offer some tours, but, again don’t yet have any other customers for the ones I was interested in. But they’re hopeful for at least one of the days I’m here. They took my number and will contact me by WhatsApp if they can get a tour together. We’ll see.

If that doesn’t happen, I might try to make my way out to the coast on my own somehow.

Whether or not that happens, I’ll probably enjoy taking in the sights and bumming around Lecce.

In the meantime, here are some pictures I took of the old town during my stroll and in the evening to and from dinner.