::Lecce::

You wants that, founded by Malennio, child of Dasumno and first king of the Salentinis, 1211 years before Christ, the City came, after the destruction of Sow, occupied by Lictio Idomeneo that, besides giving her name, he would have introduced the Greek culture of it. But this is legend and with the legends he doesn't make history.
The origins of Lecce stay, therefore, still enveloped by a rent veil of mystery to space out which well few they assist the ancient geographers, in whose texts are not found that vague indications on the existence and on the consistence of this chief town.
A parenthesis historically even more dark it is then that inclusive between the IV and the XI century; period of struggles, of lootings, of peculiar conquests of the most tenebrous middle age.
One of the most florid periods, for the city, it was instead that from it mistake in the slow Middle Age, under the County of the Enghiens, during which Lecce was reconstituted to new life by the decadence in which falls with the sunset of the empire of West and with to arrive some times, even more dark, of the immediate middle age. The city came so to become wealthy of important institutions, among which that CONCISTORIUMs PRINCIPIS that it had jurisdiction on the whole region pugliese and part of that lucana. To that times it also reassembles the institution of the biweekly market that, today it develops still him flourishing, recalling big number of dealers of the whole region and from those more distant of Italy, usual to be worthwhile to Lecce for the interesting bargainings the products of the province, whose volume reaches million of liras today.
For his/her intellectual traditions it deserved the appellative in Athens Of the PUGLIEs. Despite the evolution of the times to which Lecce has not been extraneous, the city still preserves its aspect of ancient town, that an expression of art confers her.

:: The Chief town of the Salento ::

boasts a monumental patrimony that to good right form object of the most impassioned admiration from whoever happens you and that few cities can offer. Patrimony for the maximum part constituted by buildings risen among the end of the '500, when the Renaissance style was about to flow in the Baroque one and the principles of the '700, when the Baroque one mentioned to forms of greater composure. It is during such period that Lecce becomes wealthy, for the patronage of the Church, of her most pompous ecclesiastical buildings, in whose construction teachers and artisans, the one in to conceive, the others in to perform, have competed for ingeniousness and creative strength, giving to every new construction an unmistakable imprint of originality, even if sometimes exuberant. They rose so the complexes of Plaza of the Cathedral with the Building of the Seminar, the Episcopio, the Cathedral and the Bell Tower, the Basilica of the Rosary, Asked her of S. Chiara, S. Matteo, the Graces and the Basilica of S. Croce, that it constitutes the most important monument of the epoch.
Don't believe, however, when the above-mentioned monuments are seen, that every artistic interest is exhausted in the respects of Lecce. It is this a city that to every pushed foot he/she offers the surprise of a portal to the visitor, of a loft, of a bow, of a window of delicious invoice and almost always bright the same style that repeats him and he/she renews him as a '«leit motiv» musical, in the symphony of forms and expressions that the artists of other times knew how to compose. It is a kind of embroidery that abandons him on the whole city with the lightness of a lace.