Again, I apologize for the delays, but as we wind down our stay in Lecce, the days seem to fill up and time slips away without a blog entry. However, I did promise to talk a little bit more about our travels to Matera.
On day two, we got up and walked around the city as the sun was coming up on Matera. We captured a number of different views of the sassi, these cave cities that were for centuries, the actual town of Matera.
Now they have been modernized and have become chic places in which to live.
However, there are still places where the original caves stand empty.
It was great fun to wander about the maze of streets, occasionally turning a corner and discovering a passageway of “cats”!
Also the flowers are lovely this time of year, and here we found this group of wild flowers just growing out the dirt and stone
This truly is a town we will have to return to in our further adventures in Italy.
Later that day, we headed out to drive to the Tyrrhenian coast. I had the course to the sea all mapped out, when the “helpful” fellow at the front desk told us that my way was going to be very confusing and that we should head south along the Ionian coast and across the toe of the boot to Maratea, a town that we had chosen for lunch.
What we soon discovered was that using his directions there was no way we could reach Maratea for lunch (perhaps not even for dinner or a midnight snack. We drove for three and a half hours and were not even close. Finally, we stopped for something to eat. We just picked this little roadside Trattoria.
It was a little early for lunch (only 12:30) and “Mama” was just cooking up lunch. However, she was delightful and provided us with wine and told us that our Insalata di Mare (Seafood Salad) and our Pesce Griglia (Grilled Fish) would be ready in 15 minutes. 40 minutes later, we sat down to a fabulous meal. Everything was fresh and the grilled fish was all cooked to perfection. While there was no English spoken, she seemed to appreciate our efforts with Italian and our rave reviews of lunch. She consented to a photo to commemorate the occasion.
Then it was back on the road again. Never one to go back the same way, we continued south and then turned east toward the Tyrrhenian coast. It was a beautiful drive, with dramatic mountains and dazzling valleys.
However, because of time, we were only able to drive past the turn off to the coast and never actually get there. We did return via the route I had originally planned and despite the words of the desk clerk, there was nothing “tricky” about it at all. If we had followed the original plans, we would have made it to the coast. Ah, next time, I guess.
We did have a lovely dinner back in Matera. Again, it was a very small, local trattoria, called Ristorante Il Contuccio, where Polley had a delicious mushroom soup, served in a large brioche
while I had a polenta and sausage antipasti
with rabbit to follow.
We returned to our room quite worn out from the day-long drive and just sipped a bit of wine and looked out at Matera at night.
The next day, following breakfast and some good conversation with some Americans who were on a bike tour of the region, we just strolled around town and enjoyed the locals as they sipped caffé and talked. I especially enjoy the groups of old men that gather to jabber the morning away. In our country, they meet at McDonalds, here it is in the shade of an old tree.
About noon, we headed for Lecce, about three and a half hours away. We arrived around 5, with a couple of stops for wine and a bit of lunch. As always, travel days are exhausting, so it was an early evening for both of us.
Ed and Polley
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