An easily polished limestone rock and the genius of artists such as Giuseppe Zimbalo made possible the existence of urban landscapes that seem to have been sculpted directly from the depths of the abyss: this is the incomparable beauty of the art known as Salento Baroque.
There was a time when the Salento was completely submerged by water. A very ancient period, prior to the last ice age, but one that left its mark deeply on this land and whose effects we still see today in the monuments and historic buildings that adorn it thanks to the extraordinary limestone from which they are built.
Walking around the historic centres of Salento and taking a closer look at the ‘skin’ of the most magnificent buildings, it is easy to realise that the stone that makes them up is not smooth but rather porous, full of wrinkles, in many cases hollowed out by rain and wind into small perforations and craters. The resemblance of these small canyons to the rocks eroded by the sea is not accidental: once upon a time, Lecce’s stone and carparo – the two main local building elements – also lay in the depths of the abysses. And now that those deposits have surfaced and been quarried to build cities, it is as if the architecture of Salento has taken on the face of the seabed. A rough, bumpy, irregular face, full of asperities that nevertheless seem to have been conceived by divine hands.
The importance that the local lithotype had in the development of this art is one of the least told aspects of Salento’s Baroque, which reached a level of spectacularity different from the rest of the world, perhaps thanks to this stone, already Baroque in itself, full of indentations and whimsical play. In Salento ‘man walks on mastic trees and clay. Every stone has creaked and corroded for centuries’: through these onomatopoeic words of the great poet Salvatore Quasimodo, we seem to see them, the stones of Salento, sunburnt, corroded by the sea and polished by the wind.
On the other hand, baroque derives from the Spanish barrueco and Portuguese barroco, terms that indicated the anomalous shape of the scaramazza pearl, characterised precisely by its unruliness, which in the common imagination has always been accompanied by genius: there is, perhaps, no more appropriate image to describe the intoxicating madness of Salento’s Baroque masterpieces.
For example, the Basilica of Santa Croce in Lecce is recognised as the most iconic artefact of this art because of its façade, rich in sculptures, ornaments, corbels, details, embellishments: one hundred years to build it – between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries – all eternity to be enchanted by it. A lush expanse of relief details that is a manifesto of the horror vacui (i.e. the fear of emptiness) typical of Baroque art: no smooth surfaces must remain, but every palm must release energy, enriched with phantasmagorical decorations. On the other hand, the Baroque is the artistic current born out of the Counter-Reformation, the act with which the Catholic Church decided to react to the rift caused by Martin Luther and his Protestant Church: in order to hold on to its faithful, the Vatican chose to rely on art that would enchant the people, that would increase their emotional involvement by presenting them with images and spaces that were scenographically impressive.
And it is precisely on the façade of Santa Croce that the most attentive eye will notice the profile of one of Lecce’s most important architects and artists of the time, Giuseppe Zimbalo (although some scholars attribute him to his grandfather, Francesco Antonio, others to another famous Baroque architect, Giulio Cesare Penna). A grandson and son of art, Zimbalo is the artist who most contributed to creating the image of Baroque Lecce that we still admire today. In addition to the façade of Santa Croce, he designed the lower façade of the Palazzo dei Celestini, a former convent next to the Basilica that is now the seat of the Province; he also designed the column of Sant’Oronzo that dominates the city from the centre of the square of the same name: Zimbalo built it by repurposing the collapsed rocks from one of the two Roman columns placed at the end of the Via Appia in Brindisi, thus creating the ideal base on which to place the statue of the city’s patron saint.
Above all, Zimbalo is the author of Lecce Cathedral and its bell tower, two works that are remarkable for their workmanship but even more so for their theatrical layout. Zimbalo had the intuition to realise that entering the piazza one would find oneself in the presence of a mere side wall of the cathedral. So, he decided to make it too a façade, giving it a purely scenic function of visual impact at the entrance to the square, while the main façade remained the one used for the entrance to the church. Thanks to this contrivance – and together with the contribution of the other splendid buildings facing onto the Cathedral Square, namely the Episcopio and the Palazzo del Seminario – this place opens up before the eyes of the observer, or rather the spectator, like a theatrical backdrop. This, too, is an entirely Baroque peculiarity: the scenographic treatment of urban space, always with a view to astonishing and marvelling the beholder.
Over the last few decades, Lecce Baroque has been reconfigured by scholars as a more general Salento specificity: in fact, almost all the towns in the province boast monuments of great historical and artistic importance. Starting with Nardò, the second city in the province and a bishop’s seat since ancient times, where there is one of the most characteristic Baroque squares in Italy: Piazza Salandra. An authentic little hall enclosed by splendid 17th and 18th century buildings such as the Sedile, the Palazzo dell’Università, the Church of San Domenico and that of San Trifone, forming a marvellous backdrop around the iconic Guglia dell’Immacolata that stands out in the centre of the square.
Gallipoli deserves special mention, whose historic centre stands on an island surrounded by the Ionian Sea and inside which some authentic Baroque pearls can be admired. One of them is the Cathedral of Sant’Agata, in whose façade we find Giuseppe Zimbalo, who designed the upper order. How could we fail to mention Galatina with the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, where the ubiquitous Zimbalo, author of the three portals that give access to the church, also put his hand to it; Copertino with the Basilica of the Madonna delle Nevi; Galatone with the sanctuary of the Santissimo Crocifisso; the Palazzo Ducale in San Cesario; the Church of San Domenico in Tricase, the small churches of San Vito and San Nicola in Lequile or the mother churches of Casarano, Muro Leccese and Poggiardo.
And finally, Melpignano, where Giuseppe Zimbalo has left another of his works: the renovation of the Convento degli Agostiniani and the adjoining church of the Carmine, a monumental complex that every year in August serves as the backdrop for the great concert of the Notte della Taranta, an event with over 100,000 attendees that has now become a cult of the Italian summer.
Baroque is one of the symbols of Salento’s cultural identity that still fulfils the purpose for which it was born: to enrapture and amaze the observer. An art form of indescribable beauty that makes the impossible possible even through optical artifices, as in theatre. This is all thanks to formidable geniuses like Giuseppe Zimbalo, capable of creating from a precious amber-coloured limestone rock a landscape unique in the world, which seems to have been sculpted directly in the depths of the sea and then emerges, shaking and shining, illuminated by the sun’s rays and caressed by the Salento breezes.