Brooms and horehounds, gardens enclosed within dry-stone walls and vast orchards mark the road leading to the Selva di Fasano, over the plain of olive trees running toward the sea. We are in the heart of Apulia, on the last spur of the plateau, from where the Selva faces the Murgia of Trulli. But the South is faraway, elsewhere.

Here the sun does not possess a carnal light and the summer has not the mourning sense of the pitiless Sicilian summer. The colours are terse but graded, restful, calm. The local atmosphere does not assault the visitor with the violence of contrasts, the ambiguous human allusions, or with the indecent drama of life and death confused in the same sign of an external nature. Here there is no exhibition of strong colours.

Cosy, clean, tidy towns; a respectable, respectful and provincial urban middle-class; a calm population, sometimes apparently inattentive; a solitary aristocracy of wealth or of blood quietly handing on sumptuous villas and cultivated lands perfectly outlined, inscribed in the natural landscape.

Also the smallest villages are decorous and irreproachable, nothing is out of place, as if a natural reserve induces the inhabitants to show only the civic aspect of their humanity.

Each of these villages and towns is an intellectual adventure: an adventure ruled by an emotion coming from a world where the hand of man has created without destroying, following the ancient and alive consciousness of its measure.

An uninterrupted and visible thread runs from prehistory to today. Each historical experience left a mark the following one did not overwhelm, «and, at times, to those able to see - wrote a journalist really able to see – limpid and breathless glimmers open on the chasms of time, where the immemorial past appears as limpid as the outlines of the Neolithic villages in the aerial photographs of the Tavoliere».

It is the same sensation of a rarefied time that passes without leaving scum, of transparencies without optical illusions experienced in front of the heavy Baroque façades of the Apulian palaces, the churches of Lecce and the patterns of roads running along basins, fields, olive tree groves, gardens and dunes, from village to village, from town to town, whose layout shows no reason of contingent usefulness.

Lecce. From this town, the emblem of the most civil provincialism, entangled into its own beauty, starts an Apulia within the Apulia: the Salento, stretching from Lecce to Brindisi, Otranto, Gallipoli and Santa Maria di Leuca, the extreme cape on the Mediterranean sea. A region sloping between two seas, from the low Ionian side to the high Adriatic one, a panorama made of space, sun and sea. The dunes slope down in the sea between holes and bushes. No signs of bathing establishments, of huts, of tourist invasion.

Here the sea is without history and timeless; we can affirm that it is the same of thousands and thousands years ago. Here the magnificence of nature is not forced into modern urban dimensions. The silence, exalted and underlined by the passing of few cars, explicates that this land was already primordial when the Greeks reached it.

The skyscraper of Gallipoli is stuck like a pin into the heart of the seafaring town - perfect with its harbour and its racy Baroque alleys, full of markets and smell of fish, with the sea peeping through wings of carved stone and dark passages - and maybe is the only contradictory element of the whole Ionian itinerary up to Santa Maria di Leuca. A road scattered with houses and cottages dotting of white the countryside and the coast, white colour on the green of fields and the silver of the olive trees, on blue sea and yellow sand.

From the cape of Santa Maria di Leuca, the extremity of the land, starts the sudden ascent to the high part of the region, the Adriatic side. A terrace, a porch, a lighthouse, a church and then the village, between the rocky ravines. Our journey goes on.

The landscape changes: high sheer cliffs, whose white rock are mirrored in a blue sea greener than the Ionian one, house cosy sandy inlets.

The landscape changes but the atmosphere is still the same. No bathing establishments, no facilities. It seems like if the inhabitants of this region refuse the idea of selling this sky and these colours, as if they did not belong to them.

This seascape, where the white and the blue achieve the completeness of colour, or these countryside where sky blue turns into silver and green without changing name but altering mysteriously its aspect, all this is not considered attractive.

Edgardo Bartoli