Dan had a three-day weekend for Easter, so we packed up Ta and headed to Lecce with our friends and their dogs. Don't worry, they drove separately, although at one point we did have four people and three dogs in one car.
Dan doesn't so much as sit in chairs as he does lay in them.
Before we could start our first adventure, we waited for Savannah and John to come to our hotel. We had guaranteed parking and they did not, so we figured we would do all the driving. Apparently the night before, when they got into town, there was no parking near their hotel as the area around it became a traffic zone after 20:00. They finally found a parking spot in the narrow downtown streets three meters from a parking sign. In the morning they went to move their car to a better spot. Only, they couldn't as their car was parked in. By the local police. Who immediately started telling Savannah "solo polizia!" (only police). She tried to explain that they parked last night and didn't know that it was only for police, but if they would move their cars, she would move hers. This didn't seem to get through and every new person who came to join the fracas also told her "solo polizia!" At some point they asked if she was police. The right answer may have been to just say yes, but Savannah said no to which she got another "solo polizia!" They then asked if John was police; she said he wasn't but that he was part of NATO. They didn't know what NATO was and answered with "solo polizia!" At some point she tried to convince them that if they just moved their cars so she could move her car she would never come back. EVER. She would also stop any of her friends from visiting Lecce if they could just leave the parking space. This also didn't work. At some point, after about a hundred "solo polizia!" she got the police to move the other cars moved, and got their car out. By the time they got to us, they both really needed some wine. Which was good because......
....our first adventure was out to Conti Zecca winery!
They make a lot of wine. Interestingly, depending on the quality/who its being sold to, there are different labels. Individuals get one label, grocery stores get another, wholesalers a third, and so on.
More of their wines!
The containers on the bottom are the soils from the different vineyard locations.
They have some old school or possibly just a very different type of fermentation vat.
They're made out of cement or concrete. I forget which.
These tanks have impellers to keep things moving.
A close up of the impeller. Both Dan and John were interested in this one.
Austrian oak barrels.
French oak barrels.
ALL the wines!
They're stacked on yoke shaped racks so that one barrel can be moved without having to move ALL of the ones around it.
John and Dan for scale. SO MUCH WINE.
The wines we sampled. We purchased a few bottles of the two on the left.
In case you don't need no fancy glass bottle, you can get a 5 liter jug of wine from a gas pump style system. We got two of these.
The Conti Zecca winery produces on average 5,000 bottles a day and around 3,000,000 bottles a year.
John, Dan, and I were fascinated by the bottling machinery.
Savannah and the guide just laughed at us.
The dogs did not come to the winery with us. We went back to our hotel to drop off the car and to pick up Ta for city wandering.
A little street art.
Lecce's Roman Amphitheater was built in the 2nd Century.
At one point it could hold 25,000 people.
Now at least half of it is buried under buildings and other monuments.
Lecce has some cute pedestrian only streets.
We stopped at John and Savannah's hotel to get their dogs and to let ALL the dogs run around on the roof top terrace. The other roofs have weird bulges in them.
A panorama of puppies playing. They're are only three dogs, but because they were running all over the place during the panorama photo it looks like there are six of them.
Having acquired all the dogs we started to wander around Lecce. We discovered the Piazza Duomo which has the Lecce Cathedral. It also had this guy, who kept trying to give us a tour, but we didn't want one.
Diagram of the cathedral and square.
The cathedral was originally built in 1144.
It was renovated in 1659 by Giuseppe Zimbalo.
This is the 700th church I've visited.
That number isn't accurate, but it feels like it is.
A very ornate side altar.
It's a very dramatically lit church.
Nothing like a beheading for a stained glass image.
It's the Illuminati!
A map of the churches in historic Lecce. ALL the red dots!
One of the old gates. There's a lot going on here. This is the Porta Rudiae.
It has the city's patron saint, St. Oronzo on the top.
Lecce is sometimes called "The Florence of the South" because so much of it is done in the Baroque style like Florence.
I liked this store's iron gate.
The dome of a funny little octagon church - the church of St. Maria of the Gate.
Look it's the beheading again! I'm going to guess this has to do with St. Oronzo.
Because....why else would it be in different churches around the city?
A very detailed stained glass window.
Inside the dome of St. Maria of the Gate.
It was kind of dingy to be honest.
A diagram of the church.
We left the old town and wandered off to find a garden to walk through.
I found some street art.
And we found the garden to be reasonably kept up and clean.
Also there was a fountain!
Everyone went to their hotels at this point to rest/take naps/whatever. We met up later for dinner.
On the way to dinner we passed these Easter cake things. They looked pretty good.
This concludes our adventures for today.
