I am sitting on a low, limestone wall built of jagged white rocks piled on each other without a cement sealing. The brilliant, azure blue sky frames a landscape composed of giant, gnarled olive trees planted in an immaculately raked red brown clay soil. I could be in Greece I think to myself, as a suspicion of a sea breeze slightly rustles the olive’s needle-like leaves. But, I am not in Greece. I am in the Salento of Southern Italy’s Puglia region.

I eagerly went there to see an area where people still speak a form of Greek and the Orthodox faith is still practiced by many. I was limited by time, so I purposely decided to visit only the Salento. This is the relatively flat heel of Italy, a rocky, fertile agricultural zone roughly bounded on the north by Baroque Lecce and the west by the burly, industrial metropolis of Taranto.

This area was once part of Greater Greece or Magna Grecia and meant as much to the ancients as any part of what we know as Greece today.

Picturesque Otranto, known as Hydrus in Antiquity was my first stop. It is said that Otranto, Italy’s easternmost town was founded in the 13th Century before the modern era. It then became a colony of Taranto but little is known of its ancient past except that the walled city on its hilltop perch guarded the narrows between the Adriatic and Ionian seas and was a gateway to the Italian peninsula from the Corinthian colony of Kerkyra or Corfu. Later in history, Otranto, with its protected cove like harbor, was the Byzantines’ major city for several centuries. Early in their hegemony of the area – called Terra d’Otranto- they built what is believed to be the first Christian church in the area. The city’s first cathedral (9th-10th Centuries) –now the Basilica of SS Pietro and Paolo - with its excellent mosaics and Greek script is hidden in a small, isolated square deep in the heart of the old citadel.

Walking around the Lungomare degli Eroi promenade outside the restored seaside wall, I found it hard to believe that Otranto, quaint and quiet as it is today was of such economic and strategic importance in the Middle Ages that it was sacked with all its 12,000 inhabitants either slaughtered or sold into slavery after the Ottoman occupation of 1482. A rather poignant monument tucked discreetly into the city walls commemorates this cataclysmic event.

I first felt the connection with Greece on the narrow, cliff hugging road south of Otranto towards Italy’s easternmost point: steep, terraced slopes behind those low dry built stone walls covered with old, gnarled olive and fruit trees doted with white washed stone houses. Seeing this felt like I was deep in the Peloponnese Peninsula.

It also led me to reflect on why this area was so important to the ancients. It is blessed with an excellent climate and very fertile though rocky lands needing clearing of rocks, as it still does. But, thirty-five centuries ago when Greeks first started exploring Puglia, people living in well-organized communities whose origins are little known were already there. They are grouped together under the name of Mesapians and are said to have come from the Illyrian (east) Coast of the Adriatic. Others say that they, like the Etruscans, were proto-Greek tribes who migrated away from the main groups of Greeks in Asia Minor much earlier.

A dialect of Greek, called Griko, is still spoken in the region. In an early 1990s census, 15000 people, mostly elderly, living in nine inland villages between Lecce and Otranto were said to be Griko speakers. Unlike Calabria – in western Magna Grecia – there isn’t an Institute of Greek Studies in the Salento. A recently passed law entitles Griko as part of the area’s culture but without young people speaking it, its future is uncertain.

Further south near Italy’s windswept easternmost point of Punta Ristola is Santa Maria Di Leuca a tiny hamlet with Neolithic remains and deep blue skies that steal the scene. The tiny church of Santa Maria Finibus Terrae is built on what is said to be the remains of a temple to Minerva. Try as I might and despite advise to the contrary, I couldn’t see the cliffs of Corfu off in the distance.

Continuing west around Punta Ristola the countryside flattens and becomes hot, dry and less hospitable. Vineyards and wheat fields with the omnipresent olive tree back endlessly long, idyllic, though treeless, sandy beaches. Modern tourism has made inroads here. Seemingly never ending campgrounds and low-rise 1970s era motels offering an array of multicolored beach chairs, cabanas and umbrellas testify to the area’s summertime resort vocation.

The next town along the coast is Gallipoli (Kalli-polis), on the eastern end of the Gulf of Taranto. Greeks founded it, obviously. Today, Gallipoli is another quaint tourist and fishing village. It also, refreshingly, has maintained its old city built on an easily defendable peninsula jutting out into the Ionian Sea. Little is left of Gallipoli’s Greek legacy except for the old fountain in the Piazza Fontana Grecia at the causeway leading into the old town. The municipal museum located in the public library hidden deep within the labyrinthine old quarter has the usual collection of bits and pieces proving its ancient past. But, my feeling, wandering through the maze of narrow, quiet streets like Via Cesare Battisti or the elegant Via Giovanni Presta leading out to the seaside Riviera Nazario Sauro avenue with its pastel colored, bright blue shuttered buildings fronting the blindingly blue Ionian Sea is of an uncanny sense of déjà vu. I could be in Corfu Town or Argostoli or another Greek city in the Ionian Islands – anywhere but Italy.

After a leisurely afternoon’s lounge on the long, sandy town beach, I reluctantly left Gallipoli for the drive through vineyards and endless olive groves to Taranto. It is safe to say that Taranto, as full of heavy industry and endless, anonymous tower block apartment buildings as it is, is at the source of ancient Greek colonization of Puglia.

Taranto was colonized in the 8th Century BC from Sparta. Significantly, it was Sparta’s only colony. But Taras, the Bull, as it was called was the most important Greek city in Magna Grecia. Throughout its long history it sent settlers to other places like Otranto and Gallipoli and was a beacon of Greek commerce and culture in all of southern Italy. Unfortunately, it ran afoul of the Roman Republic and lost its autonomy in the 2nd Century BC. It later became an important Byzantine outpost.

Very little remains visible of its ancient history. Two Doric columns from the Temple of Poseidon stand at the Piazza Castello on the peninsula (now an island) where the ancient city stood. Since Taranto was an important and strategic place for all the civilizations that occupied it, much of its substantial architecture was reincorporated into other buildings. The major cathedral, or duomo dedicated to San Cataldo (St. Cathal of Munster) contains limestone blocks said to come from ancient buildings. Most importantly, the church of San Domenico Maggiori, near the imposing fish market at the other end of the narrow, lively and picturesque Via del Duomo has a portico with large blocks visibly older than the rest of the 11th Century church.

On the seafront Corso Vittorio Emanuelle II overlooking the massive steelworks and industrial port across the narrow straits is the Palazzo Pontaleo. Just in front of the San Domenico Church, it contains impressive selections from Taranto’s renowned archeological Museo Nazionale, which is closed and will open whenever restoration and expansion permit. It is impossible to dig anywhere in the Citta Vecchia without unearthing ancient jewelry, pots or even massive bronze horses and the Museo Nazionale has them all in what is the most important Magna Grecia archeological collection in Italy.

While meandering the impossibly narrow alleys and byways of the old city, I naively hoped to come across remnants inscribed in Greek. Even though I realized that, given the several meters of urban debris that has accumulated since antiquity, I hoped to find some physical sign of Greeks’ passage in Taranto.

It was only when I was wandering through the maze-like city center of the lovely hilltop village of Martina Franca, 50 km inland from Taranto and saw the many houses with exterior stone staircases like in the Greek isles that I understood that citizens and residents of Taranto must surely have fled to the interior when the fall of Rome led to their civilization descending into chaos and anarchy. This would also explain why it is only in the center of Salento where Griko is still spoken. Descendants of the Greeks abandoned their old places along the coast of Puglia for the security of the new. Nevertheless, they left a legacy in southern Italy that comes down to us not so much as old stones but as a timeless way of life greatly contributing to what has come since.


Two of the better guidebooks to this region and the rest of Southern Italy are offered by the Rough Guides (Italy – 7th Edition – May 2005) and by the Blue Guide (Southern Italy – 10th Edition - 2004) publishers.