Snapshot: Torre dell’Orso, Salento

I often find myself staring longingly at holiday photos of the pristine southern Italian beaches I visited in 2022. Then there are the social media reels that tease and taunt with footage of transparent waters and bronzed card-playing locals, the sun kissing every expanse and crevasse of brazenly-exposed skin. I have observed Italians of all ages in various states of undress over the years, for whom the showing of skin is a god-given no-brainer. I find it both enviable and aspirational.

This particular photo was taken on the first day my son Giulio and I spent in Salento, the sub-peninsula that is the heel of Italy. This was not technically my first time in this part of the world. I had once passed through Salento as a young backpacker on a train from Rome, en route to the port of Brindisi, from where a ferry would transport my friend Pascale and I to Patras in Greece on one of those epic, rite-of-passage journeys laden with mishaps from which to tell stories for decades.

Previously, I had not understood that Salento was not really Puglia (Apulia in English), or that while Puglia geographically encompassed Salento, they were not one and the same thing – a confusing concept to anyone not from the south of Italy. This was sharply brought to my attention by a new friend, Stefano, I was to meet on my return home to Melbourne, who approached me while I was on the treadmill of the little gym in my apartment complex, in a fairly sweaty state. He had sheepishly asked about the internet in the building and when I detected an accent, he disclosed that he was from Lecce, the largest city in Salento, close to where I had been only weeks prior. We were both shocked at the discovery; he that I knew where Lecce even was and I that he was from the very region that had imprinted itself upon me in the most beautiful way. Although I had loved the entirety of Puglia, it was along the rocky coastlines of the Adriatic Sea and in the Greekish towns of Salento that I felt I had stepped out of Italy and into an untethered in-between land of warm-hearted folk, who could easily be swept into a fervour of Taranta.

Giulio and I had left Milan behind for a few days to head south, meeting my friend Pasquale (one must only travel to the heel of Italy with people named after the holy day of Easter, as seems to be my pattern!) to journey through Puglia and Salento to the southernmost part of the heel, the town of Santa Maria di Leuca, and then back to Bari from where we would fly to Milan.

I had met Pasquale in Melbourne the previous year, and together we had enjoyed nine beautiful months of lockdown dinner dates and 5km radius walks, with a promise made to end our tryst once Pasquale was on a flight back to Italy. After 12 years of living in Melbourne, he was to return to his native Basilicata to spend time with family, possibly for good. I will never know if that looming end date made those nine months more potent. We didn’t make good on our pact, deciding three weeks before his departure that we would carry on. The long-distance daily conversations sufficed, perhaps in the knowledge that I would be in Italy three months later and would travel to the south to see him. In my naïveté, I didn’t dare consider the after-Italy part.

Pasquale and I had spent several days travelling south from Praiano on the Amalfi Coast, stopping for a night in Maratea, then two days in Pasquale’s hometown by the sea – ‘his’ sea – in the Basilicata region. We had spent one last night at the Sassi of Matera, quite literally in a stone cave, before he drove me back to Bari airport, from where I would fly north to Bergamo to have a night with Giulio, his father and Nonna, before Giulio and I headed back to Bergamo airport and flew back to Bari, where we would meet Pasquale for a Pugliese adventure. This itinerary was something of an organisational feat of modern family logistics.

After two days in the seaside town of Monopoli, the three of us headed further south, situating ourselves in Martignano, a tiny town south of Lecce. I had spent hours upon hours researching the perfect little spot for us to stay, with Pasquale doing the same from Italy and assuring me that we wanted to be in Salento for at least a few days. In my research I read about a handful of specific Salentine towns in which Greek was still spoken. It was a form of Greek spoken 200 years ago, ‘Salentino Griko’, when Salento was part of the Magna Graecia – ‘Great Greece’, as named by the Romans.

The host of our accommodation, Salvatore, was kind and worldly, a little unexpected in the small, dusty town in which we had found ourselves, I am now ashamed to say. But this was the Italy I had come to love, full of surprises, contradictions and sometimes a modernity more progressive than what I knew at home in Melbourne. Salvatore, who had previously worked for NGOs all over the world, told me of his Greek-speaking grandparents and the only real permanent home he had ever known, this very house that they had left to him in Martignano and to where he had moved his young family from central Africa, where he had been living and met his now wife. We shared stories of our Greek heritage, his English accented by consonants more akin to Greek than Italian. My spirit felt right at home here, in this little town that identified with a culture from across the sea.

For one of our day trips, we decided to set out to the well-known beach of Torre dell’Orso. I knew little of this spot, other than that it was overrun with tourists in summer and that it was a ‘must-see’. We drove for the 15 minutes or so in great anticipation, maybe 20ish minutes because Pasquale was an overly cautious driver, for which I was grateful. The streets were wide and bereft of greenery; houses spawned from the same concrete as the roads, as if to thoroughly blanket the dry earth beneath. Despite it being a 22-degree day, the bright sun gave the illusion of it being much hotter, scorching the pavement as though the day were a late summer surprise. I loathed to imagine the heat here on a typical summer’s day.

We parked and Pasquale checked our carpark again, and then again, while Giulio and I eagerly forged ahead with our beach gear, looking for these ‘two sisters’ or ‘bear towers’, as the town’s name suggested. I eyeballed little seafood cafes on the way in, noting a lunch spot for us later on. As we approached the main road lining the sea with little more than a few sleepy shops and a rundown corner bar, I beheld the sparkling sea – iridescent and clear as the day itself.

We marched down the steps to the shore, thongs flip-flopping against the concrete, and found a little corner of sand to claim as our own for the next few hours. Although it was the shoulder season, the beach was still busy with locals enjoying languid hours al mare. I made Pasquale hold up a towel while I attempted to change into my bathing suit without exposing myself, while he huffed in confusion at my modesty. That Italian skin thing again. I had to be quick, because Giulio had beelined into the water and I needed to catch up to him.

When I did, I had no hesitation stepping right into the water, warm and without the threat of jellyfish and sea creatures that might sting or bite, as was the case at home. It was so freeing. Together Giulio and I explored little rockpools and searched for the tiny fish that darted this way and that. We were explorers in a bay with nothing to be found, for in its clarity the water held no secrets. Here, the only thing to do was to be. This was the magic I found that day, in this bay of perfection with my curious boy. Just to be.

Pasquale skulked about on the sand, the water too cold, he said. Giulio and I were ever the foreigners, splashing about as if it were the middle of summer. The only thing that lured us out was the promise of crusty bread stuffed with grilled octopus and chilled summer wine (for me, obviously).

We later feasted with the sea lingering on our skin, the sun hitting our backs as we bit down on the warm bread and salty, charred octopus. Here I lost my sense of place and felt that I could have been back on the Greek Isle of Paros with Pascale, as we were 20 years earlier, savouring similar flavours and taking in the concrete jutted against the brilliant sea in an arid land. My Italian-speaking Giulio brought me back, chewing on octopus and writing a menu for his own seafood restaurant on his napkin, Pasquale patiently spelling-out the names of dishes. My little traveller was quite at home in this part of Italy.

‘Will you buy a house here, mamma?’, he asked me a couple of times in those days in Salento. Forse …