Holiday in Salento
Holidays in Salento means wanderful holiday
The chief town of the province is Lecce, "the Florence of Southern Italy". It is a town where losing oneself is, more than an accident on the way. It is a duty of the intellect. Lecce, home of the Baroque, is more than an architectural style, a way to relive past. Time in Lecce passes through its tortuous streets, through places that you would never recognize, because the streets change perspective continuously.
Salento begins at Lecce and ends on the heel of Italy . It moved to east as if a Greek God, to enjoy himself, had thrown the boot towards him. "Land of Otranto" was called the Salento, land of Normans. The town that gave the name to this land was a small Mediterranean power leaned out on the East with its monasteries as San Nicola of Casole, one of the most cultured and sophisticated places in Europe during the XIII century.
There precious manuscripts were copied, there people spoke Greek and Latin, there people landed from Paris as from Bisanzio. The monastery of Casole had from the XI to the XV century in the whole South of Italy a cultural role which anticipated the Humanistic movement of northern Italy. Here flourished an active center of studies that picked up the ancient Greek-Latin codes. For the first time in Europe, in the "scriptorium casolano" rose in 1160, the Students' House, the second rose in London in 1183.