I left Tricase in the rain, reached Maglie in a storm, and then caught a ride to Otranto generously offered by the man who manages the apartment I rented here. We could communicate only by auto-translation, which worked pretty well, except that some place names have other meanings and Italian lets you drop pronouns, so I'd have to field questions like, "when does it get to shirts?"
Otranto's a beautiful place, and has kept a lot of its dignity despite having a Christmas store and a selfie museum. To avoid disappointment, be aware that the selfie museum doesn't display selfies, it has dumb props for the taking of selfies; it's a museum in the sense of being a temple to the muse of selfies. She doesn't appear much in classical sources, because everyone found her a bit embarrassing.
It is unmistakably a tourist town in the off-season: fairground rides, food stalls, and a target-shooting booth are shuttered or covered in canvas. The Castle of Otranto, site of Horace Walpole's weird gothic fairytale, is deserted, and so is the cathedral, with its medieval mosaic floor and its chapel holding the bones of people massacred by the Ottomans. Equally quiet is the tiny market on a gravel patch by the canal. A Piaggio Ape ("bee") tricycle is parked there and three old men sit on lawn chairs selling the small amount of produce you can fit in a Piaggio Ape. I like that the old men of Puglia don't do anything alone. If you have a head of lettuce to sell, you call up a couple of buddies.
Otranto has hikes for both kinds of people: those who love caves and those who love bauxite.
Shirtlessness in literature
The most popular hike outside the city goes to an old bauxite quarry. It's fair to be skeptical of a hike whose chief glory is a disused quarry, but it is, in fact, an amazing route.
It runs along the coast to a medieval watchtower and climbs to a stone wall marking what a hand-painted sign announces is an agriturismo operation; a good place to advertise, except that the wall encloses an uninviting field of rocks and thorns. "Welcome! Your project will be to clear this field and use the rocks to build a pajara. And put something interesting in it for hikers. Drug lab, leopard den, kiosk, be creative."
Back down on the coast is a cluster of barrel-vaulted WWII bunkers you can wriggle awkwardly down into and a man fishing in a hidden cove. The coast here is bare eroded limestone, all pits and sharp ridges, like a coral reef or a hostile alien world with good fishing. I have always felt that two dumb similes are just as good as one good one.
Along the beach that comes next, some industrious beachcomber has built a lean-to of pallets and driftwood. Could beachcombing be the retirement hobby I'll need? No, modernity has ruined it. The internet says that serious beachcombers now track storms and study tide schedules; they'd always be combing out the good stuff ahead of you and then squealing off in black SUVs like the bad guy in Twister.
The trail was almost empty early on, and absolutely empty farther up the coast. The last person I passed was a shirtless man with an enormous pot belly, with whom I exchanged grave buongiornos. It was heartening to learn I was not, after all, the worst-dressed man in Italy. Later, I even took a page from his book -- Bare-Bellied In Puglia: A Failed Social Experiment, obtainable at any struggling bookstore at a steep discount -- and took off my shirt. A few minutes later, reflecting that one page was enough, I put it back on.
At the end of the beach, a row of skeletal limestone fingers tickle the sea, and then the trail runs along a steep slope for the long and tricky walk to the lighthouse. It becomes narrow and rugged and picks up the habit of disappearing among the rocks and then turning up later on, which is just starting to get tiresome when you approach the promontory. Just before the lighthouse is a low stone wall enclosing a shallow cliff in the hillside. If you eagerly explore it for archaeological wonders, you discover a grill and a bag of charcoal. "No doubt part of the Grillin' Horizon so well-attested in this region," you muse pompously.
The lighthouse seemed a likely tourist spot. I had a vision of a crowd of sightseers and maybe someone selling coffee from an espresso machine mounted on a Piaggio Ape -- it was a detailed vision -- but there was no one there at all. A sign in front of the lighthouse promises an ecological museum inside, but the lighthouse is locked and shuttered. From here, long gravel ramps switchback up to a road and a military base. Along the way, signs tell you about the history and wildlife of the area. One suggests that you might see sperm whales, or, at the right time of year, swordfish pursuing tuna. I saw a cargo ship and a seagull.
The way back up to Otranto along the inland path is a dawdle, and the quarry itself, notionally the star turn, is really just sort of interesting. It's surrounded by striking mounds of red earth, presumably bauxite, and the water is a milky green.
The legality of access to the quarry is a bit ambiguous. Parts of the surrounding high ground are wired off, and to get out (having, admittedly, probably taken the wrong route), I have to duck under a locked gate hung with forbidding signs -- whether to avoid liability problems from the kinds of idiots who fall into quarries or to discourage bauxite claim-jumpers, I'm not sure. All I know is that I'll be flying home with what I assume is a fortune in bauxite.
Artificial caves and the forbearance of farmers
Otranto and its hinterland are riddled with artificial caves (known here as hypogea) dug for storage, as graves, or to make olive oil in (advantages: temperature control, security, owning a sweet cave). My apartment complex has a glassed-in set of 17th century storage pits in the parking garage, and it celebrates them in its name and in framed pictures in the apartment. And yet, I didn't book it because of my love of storage pits; that's pure coincidence. If you're not satisfied with the ones in the parking garage of your building or those dug, somewhat unsettlingly, into the sides of the ridge on which it stands, you can hike inland to see hundreds more.
In the middle of Otranto is a stone-walled canal full of reeds and slime. Branching off the canal are hiking routes that quickly multiply into a confusing web of paved roads, farm tracks, and dirt trails running above and along the low cliffs that house the grotti. Maps also mark a number of pioggi (wells), but searching for hidden wells seems both unhealthy and unnecessary, as I was likely to fall into one, anyway.
The GPS track I downloaded turned out to be by a grotto completionist, so I picked and chose, but there were no bad choices. Olive groves covered in white wildflowers, sunken ruins overgrown with bougainvillea, farmers on tractors stoutly resisting the urge to run me down, pine forests, stone walls, a dovecote tower, a mountain biker who gives an encouraging fist pump as he passes ("yeah, bro, get after it! Find those grotti!"), a Piaggio Ape that goes by with a cheery honk and a wave, bowers of drooping cane, and tattered clothing spread on trees. In one place there's a drying rack on the trail, as well. If you live in Otranto and left your washing out during a storm, I found it.
I did laundry myself on my last afternoon here, and, braving the displeasure of people who want to read about other people doing laundry, will say only that there are shades of frustration unknown to anyone who has never tried to use a washing machine in a foreign country.
