Thursday Dec 7. Lecce.

I took a full day today to wander the streets of the older part of Lecce.

From the fifteenth century on, Lecce has been one of the most important cities in southern Italy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had a building spree heavily influenced by Baroque art, and today it is a major tourist destination known as the “Florence of the South”.

During the Roman period, there were a fair number of Jewish settlements throughout the area. With the fall of the western Roman Empire life for the Jewish communities got harder. Then in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was more tolerance, and a rich Jewish culture emerged in the region. But peace wasn’t to last. In the thirteenth century the region fell to the kingdom of Naples, and persecution resumed. Synagogues were forced shut and the people were obliged to identify as Jews by wearing yellow marks on their clothes.

When the Ottomans conquered the region in 1463 Jews were massacred, and another massacre, this time by Christians, occurred in 1480.

All the Jewish inhabitants of Lecci were expelled in two waves in 1510 and 1541. This freed up space within the city walls where urban redesign could happen, and new churches and palazzi were built. I think it is important to remember that much of the Lecce Baroque we admire today had such a brutal beginning.

This is a sixteenth century palazzo built on the site of the Jewish ghetto after the 1510 expulsion.

A soft, easily carvable limestone is quarried near here and forms the basis for the Baroque refinements that characterize nearly all the churches. It isn’t smooth and shiny like marble - it looks somewhat like plaster. There is definitely a “Lecce style” that characterizes this period.

Lecce’s museums have a curious mixture of displays. This room caught my attention. You may remember my comments about how the Polish troops fighting with the Allies weren’t properly recognized at the end of WWII (blog of November 18). In this room are a whole series of photos of Polish priests who were sent to German concentration camps and tortured or exterminated in an effort to quell Polish resistance to German occupation.

Here is a medieval Madonna with something odd at her feet…

And here is a painting that really caught me up entitled “Medusa” by an artist from Ecuador.

Finally, ‘tis the season and the towns are definitely proud of their Christmas lighting!

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Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place). All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train. I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London. On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum. Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...

Fri Oct 3. Lille.

I had a lovely day in Lille. In fact, all my days on this trip have been lovely! In the morning I went to the very large Palais des Beaux-Arts. This museum holds the largest collection of works of art of any French institution outside Paris. The collection started at the time of the French Revolution as the works of art of the nobility and of the church were confiscated, and continued on apace due to various enthusiastic municipal governments. By 1892 the collection was so large and important that the Palais, its current house, was constructed in the centre of town. The first fun aspect was the recent work of the Swiss artist Felice Varini who used the museum’s interior as his canvas. The oldest works of art are in the ‘basement’, beautifully displayed. Look at the marvellous three dimensionality of this (flat) marble plaque sculpted by Donatello (c 1435) showing Salomé dancing for the head of John the Baptist. And modern technology brings statues alive by giving them back t...

September 5

I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds. The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford. The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors. They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.

Celia Walks

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