There's a transfer in Lecce to a slow rural train that halts at listless, sunstroked little towns where no one boards and no one gets off. The platform at Tricase had no sign, but the conductor was leaning out of the car, watching for people like me, and he agreed when I suggested this might be Tricase. I stopped at the grocery store by the station and was a smash hit with the proprietor, who wrung my hand and insisted on knowing how tall I was and whether I was from Germany. I get these questions a lot. I won't reveal the answers here, because I'd seem less mysterious.
Getting me into my cottage took a whole family. The father, tearing up on a scooter, found me squinting at house numbers in the wrong alley, and joined the mother and two children in giving the tour. It's a "lamia", with a sunken floor, a star-vaulted bedroom, and windows 8' off the ground hung with cords with which to swing the shutters futilely back and forth.
The Via Francigenia pilgrimage route runs through here. It's a modern reconstruction of an itinerary from Canterbury to Rome, with this southern extension for those who wanted (while this was possible) to go on to Jerusalem. It's not popular. I walked the part to Marittima, and the only other walker was a man in a black tracksuit who turned off to Tricase Porto, and I'm not sure he was a pilgrim. If he was, he was treading water, spiritually speaking, because whatever eschatological advantages he was gaining from the pilgrimage he was frittering away at the same time. The tracksuit alone has to be worth a couple of years in purgatory, and playing audio from his phone was worse.
The Via runs along haphazard smallholdings of every shape but rectangular; the historical poverty of Puglia is easier to understand when you think of people trying to wrest a living from these little trapezoids of stony ground. The best option was to grow olives, and it apparently still is. Fields show the trees' stages of life. They start out leafy and proudly upright and develop into leafless, tortured-looking things. But don't be fooled, they love it here. Most fields also hold a curious dry-stone building like a truncated cone or pyramid; these are pajare, once used for storage or as temporary homes for farmers.
The prime stretch runs on red dirt through a national park and takes in a clifftop tower covered in scaffolding and a grotto. You can clamber down to the grotto, but I advise against it. The way down is thick with spiny weeds, the footing is bad, and the grotto is a dent filled with thorns. There's also a very nice pajara on the path, though, and it's important to go into one, because otherwise you'll never be able to shake the nagging suspicion that there's something interesting inside them.
Marittima was a attractive little town, but everything was closed. Nothing happens in the afternoon in Puglia. The day has seasons, and spring is at 4:30PM. Then, clothing stores and hair stylists raise their shutters; people come out to shop for clothes and get their hair done, bundled up warmly against the room-temperature weather; lights turn on; argumentative old men crowd onto benches in the piazzas; butterflies emerge from their chrysalises, flowers bloom, flocks of colourful migratory birds return and sing songs of hope and promise, and so on. Then, at 1:30PM the next day, everything slams shut again.
A section to delight lovers of long stories about public transit
Things in Puglia tend to turn into minor adventures, whether you want them to or not. Public transit is a good example. There's a lot to be said about the bus system here, but it's the sort of thing you really want to bang out on a typewriter and make bad photocopies of, or turn into a 17th century-style pamphlet with nasty woodcuts. Essentially, knowledge of bus routes and stops and payments is a secret wisdom inaccessible to outsiders.
To get back from Marittima, I bought a Trenitalia bus ticket, but Trenitalia wasn't telling where the stop was, and Google Maps thought it knew, but was, I gradually realized, wrong. It's a bit of a jar to find Google Maps fallible here. It also believed a weed-choked ditch in Tricase to be a public footpath. Missing the Trenitalia bus meant catching a local one, but how to buy a ticket? You can usually get them at tobacconists -- and note the opportunity to stamp out the two great evils of smoking and Puglia's transit ticketing system at once -- but Marittima's was, naturally, closed. The collective that runs the buses, COTRAP, has a web site, but it is totally evil. COTRAP also has an app, which orders methamphetamine precursors to your home address and then sets your battery on fire.
The only option was to try to buy one from the driver. The internet can't agree on whether this is possible or not. In fact, that saintly gentleman not only waited for me to run over from where the signed stop was to where it actually was, he waved my cash and card away and gave me a ride for free. He's my best friend in Puglia.
On gorges and cod
On my last day, I went down to Gagliano to hike a gorge. There was absolutely no one else on the train. "Gagliano?" snapped the conductor, checking my ticket efficiently like he saw passengers all the time. Is it demoralizing running this ghost train back and forth? Is it a backwater assignment where you serve time waiting for a break on the main lines, or where you're sent for bungling something important, like a detective getting traffic duty?
The Ciolo gorge is a quality gorge. It's spanned by a locally-famous bridge, it has striking limestone cliffs on both sides, and its slopes hold enough pajare and dry-stone walls to satisfy anyone. The southern cliff is in the sun and is streaked with rusty orange, while the northern one is stained with black and dotted with shade-casting overhangs like the eyes and mouths of a row of ghoulish faces. It's market day in the town itself. Outside the supermarket are rows of canvas canopies shading stalls selling produce, meat, clothes, and fish. Huge salt cod lie in baskets and flies circle them, intrigued. The supermarket itself has its front rolled up and is just another stall. I would have liked to buy a salt cod. I've always sort of wanted to hit someone with one. At one time, you could have built a whole Vaudeville career on an idea like that. Or leave one in the kitchen at work with a "help yourself" note.
