Not only a riot of Baroque ornaments: the traveler who goes as far as the Salentine capital discovers stories that are also much older, such as that of Lupiae and Rudiae and the writer Quintus Ennius, father of Latin literature.
Strolling through the streets of Lecce is an ecstasy of details that draw your gaze upwards and open your mouth before the intoxicating contradiction between lust and authenticity. The balconies of the palaces, the frames of the doors, columns, and rose windows paint a dense and lush landscape of carvings and decorations whose magnificence seems to be at odds with a land with a simple, authentic nature.
These souls, in reality, are faces of the same, sublime coin, which has its roots well before the period – between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – in which Lecce laid the foundations to become, unanimously, the Capital of the Baroque. So what was Lecce before becoming the “Lecce” that the whole world knows?
The city has a much older history, before the Trojan War, around 1200 years before Christ, in an area like Salento which has been inhabited since the Middle Paleolithic and then reached by the Messapic civilizations. Thanks to its strategic position the peninsula becomes a crossroads for the traffic of goods and people to and from Greece and the East. It goes without saying that for the Romans the conquest of this area became a priority so that Lecce maintained its economically flourishing and culturally lively centrality. At the time the city was called Lupiae, a Latinisation of the original Greek toponym Lupía, which according to legend was due to the massive presence of she-wolves in the Salento forests, not coincidentally still the symbol of the city along with the holm oak tree.
But the curiosity that escapes many is that in Roman times there were two inhabited centres very close to each other that competed for the territory’s leadership: Lupiae, precisely, and its “rival” Rudiae. Rudiae was also previously a Messapian city and developed in parallel with Lupiae with its buildings, streets, places of worship, necropolis and even an amphitheatre. Two powerful towns, in some ways antagonistic, less than 3km away from each other, which have developed an effervescent and incredibly advanced social and cultural life for the period. It suffices to say that Rudiae is precisely the place where scholars identify the seed from which all the Latin literature of the following centuries will germinate.
It is here, in fact, that in 239 BC. Quintus Ennius was born, a writer and poet considered the father of Latin literature since he was the first to use Latin as a learned language to replace Greek, with a process similar to that with which Dante Alighieri and the poets of the Dolce Stil Novo centuries later replaced Latin with the Italian vernacular. Ennius’ most important work, the Annales, was the first epic poem to tell the history of Rome, from its foundation until 171 BC, two years before the author’s death. A masterpiece that marked a before and after in Latin literature and which will be taken as a model by Virgil to compose the Aeneid, narrating the escape of Aeneas – the progenitor of the Roman people – from Troy and his landing in Castrum Minervae or the today’s Castro, a splendid marina 15 minutes from the Don Totu historical residence.
An invisible circle between art and literature, therefore, that is enclosed between Lecce and Salento which cannot be reduced to Baroque alone and of which we could only tell a small part.
But what remains today of the ancient Lupiae and Quintus Ennius’ Rudiae? Both essentially exist on the same territory, that of the current municipality of Lecce. But unlike Lupiae, which grew under the Romans, was embellished and enriched also thanks to the construction of an artificial port for the docking of large trading ships by Emperor Hadrian (in what is now the Lecce marina of San Cataldo), Rudiae began a slow decline and was progressively abandoned.
Thus, while of Lupiae, we can admire authentic gems set in the historic centre of Lecce such as the amphitheatre that opens in the centre of Piazza Sant’Oronzo or the theatre with its perfectly preserved semicircular cavea a few meters from the Cathedral, the ancient Rudiae has become a real open-air museum on the outskirts of the Salento capital. A beautiful archaeological park has recently been recovered and valorised. Here you can see, next to the large amphitheatre, necropolis, underground tombs and portions of the Messapian fortifications as well as the Roman remains of the roads and places of worship.
The experiences of Lupiae and Rudiae, therefore, converge in today’s Lecce, constituting two of the many pieces that make up the identity of this city, Lady of the Baroque but also a treasure chest of ancient cultures, lost and then rediscovered for the benefit of those who decide, going as far as the Heel of Italy, to open a privileged window on the history of the Mediterranean populations and their succession.