Visit Salento: the whole world would like to discover it
Visit Salento now and ever. Since the days of the Grand Tour, young people, intellectuals, artists from all over Europe have come to Salento to admire its wonders. The great men and the great women let themselves be enchanted by the spirit of Salento and left everything to come here. Some names? George Berkeley, Johann Hermann von Riedesel, Henry Swinburne and Jean-Claude Richard de Saint. They were not the first explorers of Salento in the eighteenth century. As ancestors, they came to this land once still wild, making often long and troubled journeys, and described what they saw in their books. These images they have left us are breathtakingly beautiful and really capture the soul of Salento.
Gallipoli and Otranto were, together with Lecce, very popular destinations. How did it look in their eyes? The Englishman Swinburne wrote: “The width of the Peninsula at Nardò is about 35 miles; the country is bare, and the road is interrupted by some small grove of oaks … Near Otranto, the gardens full of orange trees have a more flattering vision, and a stream that flows towards the sea, ends up between the walls, and still preserves its ancient name Hydro. ”
The Prussian Riedesel says instead: “The countryside between Otranto and Gallipoli is fertile with olive trees […]. The surroundings of Otranto are delicious: there are many vineyards and gardens; The mountains of Albania, which a channel of sixty miles separate from Otranto, and which are perpetually covered with snow, are seen very clearly. ”
In this earthly paradise, still visible today, arise our hotels, in Otranto and Gallipoli, the favourite destinations of the Grand Tour, in historic buildings that date back to the times of the first visitors. Corte Palmieri is a magnificent palace dating back to the eighteenth century, located in the ancient village, a few steps from the sea. Palazzo Mosco dates back to the nineteenth century, like the Hotel Palazzo del Corso.
Carefully preserved and restored, our palaces will make you relive the same emotions experienced by the first explorers at the time of the Grand Tour.
We are sure that, visiting Salento even three hundred years later, you will agree with the abbot Saint-Non: “Nature in no other place is so rich and generous: trees of all kinds, planted next to each other in the wheat fields or in the middle of the vineyards that grow even better under this multiple shade. The pines, lemons, oranges, figs were so tall that we thought they were walnut trees. The sweet spring air, the scent of the orange blossoms and the song of the nightingale ended up adorning and embellishing this beautiful valley worthy of being sung rather than described. ”
