entry Oct 2012
| 1. The
Lecce Baroque
& the Basilica of Santa Croce (directly below) and 2. The Val di Noto and the Sicilian Baroque (here) Unfortunately,
the guardians of the Santa Croce (Holy Cross)
basilica in Lecce refused to let me web-sling my
way across the façade of this remarkable
structure for a closer examination. I had to
content myself with standing mesmerized for a
few hours and simply staring at the bewildering
ornateness. I took some photos, yes, but I'm
still not sure if, among the thousands of
sculpted figures and designs on the façade, some
ever repeat or if they are all unique.
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 As a non-architect, I don't know if this is an example of form following function or what. If the function is to show the magnificence of the Creator, a million-mile high, plain white façade would have done just as well. But if the purpose is to show the complexity of Creation —the sub-atomic particles nested within other sub-atomic particles, all of which may (or may not) really be vibrating strings and may be (or may not be) connected to alternate universes— then all I can say is that Richard Feynman probably built a time-machine (a piece of cake for him!), packed a good pen-knife with his bongo drums and went back to the 15-and-1600s to help gifted but goofy stone-masons chisel and sculpt. It took 150 years to build Santa Croce, but given the nature of time travel, the professor could have spent a century-and-a-half happily hewing and still have squeezed it all in between his Monday 9 o'clock Physics 101 and his Tuesday 2 pm called Really Hard Stuff 480 in a given week. In any event, among the various UNESCO criteria for inclusion on the World Heritage list, buildings must be "architectural works...of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science." Fittingly, then, since 2006 the architectural phenomenon known as the Lecce Baroque (Barocco Leccese) has been classified as a "tentative addition" to the World Heritage list. The abundance of structures built in the ornate style of the Barocco Leccese has earned the town of Lecce the nickname, "Florence of the South." |
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 Lecce is the
capital city of the province of the same name in the
Italian region of Puglia. The town is about 200
miles (300 km) ESE of Naples in the "heel" of the
boot of Italy (technically known as the Salentine
sub-peninsula), almost at the bottom. Lecce has been
the artistic center of the area for centuries and
contains a number of examples of this highly ornate
architectural style, developed between the second
half of the 1500s and the end of the 1600s. The
Lecce Baroque arose within the framework of reformed
religious orders such as the Theatines and Jesuits,
and was an architectural manifestation of the new
power of the Counter-Reformation, a power free to
assert itself once the Battle
of Lepanto (1571) had ended the Muslim threat
to central Europe. |
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Besides the Basilica, other noteworthy
examples in the town of Lecce, itself, include the Palazzo
della Prefettura, the Palazzo del
Seminario, the churches of Santa Chiara,
SS. Nicolò and Cataldo, and del Rosario.
The most striking example, in my view, remains the
Basilica of Santa Croce. (All of the photos on this
page are of the façade of that building.) The façade
is an astonishing array of gargoyles, corbels,
festoons, columns and cornices crowded with human
figures, flowers and animals, the precise rendering
of which was made possible by the quality of the
local limestone (called, indeed, "Leccese limestone"
by geologists), a golden- or honey-colored stone as
malleable as wood, soft enough to be carved with
small knives. Interestingly, Baroque masons treated
the finished pieces of sculpture with milk; lactose
seeped into the pores of the stone and hardened it. Construction
on
the basilica of Santa Croce began in 1549 and was
part of the renewal of the area declared by emperor
Charles V as a response to the threat of an invasion
of this particularly vulnerable part of Italy by the
same force (the Ottoman Turks) that had taken
Constantinople in the previous century. When that
threat came and passed (with the Battle of Lepanto),
local artisans exploded with creativity. The
original designers and architects were Gabriele
Riccardi, Cesare Penna and Giuseppe Zimbalo. The
entire basilica, inside and out, is a catalog of
mythology, religion and history, from the grotesque
figures to the renderings of traditional Christian
figures to the coats of arms of noble families and
representations of Turkish prisoners taken at the
Battle of Lepanto. Construction of Santa Croce was
completed in 1695. |
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Under Napoleonic rule at the turn of
the 18th to 19th century, the basilica underwent a period
of abandonment when religious orders were suppressed. Some
restoration took place in 1828, and in 1906 the Basilica
of Santa Croce was declared a national monument. It did
not suffer considerable damage in WW II. The façade was
restored in the 1980s.Architecturally, the Lecce Baroque is related to the similarly ornate style known as Spanish Plateresque (from plata, the Spanish word for 'silver', meaning in the manner of a "silversmith" —that is, intricate, fine, scrolled, etc.). It too reached its peak under Charles V and may be similarly seen as an exuberant declaration of the Counter-Reformation. It flourished in Spain, in parts of the New World under Spanish dominion and in much later revivals such as the "Spanish Colonial" style.
more extravagant Baroque architecture below
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-----------------------------------------------added Jan 2020----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is obviously related! The Val di Noto and the Sicilian Baroque
As
the crow flies, it's about 475 km/300 m southwest from
Lecce to the Val di Noto below Mt. Etna and the city
of Catania in the southeastern part of the island of
Sicily. One of the things they have in common is that
they are both splendid examples of the ornate
architecture of the southern Italian Baroque period
(around 1700). The paragraph below isfrom my page on "Other earthquakes in the South."
—1693 (Jan 11) In Sicily. Sicily lies on part of the complex convergent boundary where the African Plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate. This subduction is responsible for the formation of the stratovolcano Mount Etna and great seismic activity. This quake is the most powerful one in Italian recorded history (!), striking Sicily, Calabria, and Malta. The main quake had an estimated magnitude of 7.4 on the MMS... [moment magnitude scale] destroying at least 70 towns and cities, seriously affecting an area of 5,600 square kilometers (2,200 sq mi) and killing 60,000 people... Almost two-thirds of the population of Catania were killed. The destruction resulted in extensive rebuilding of the towns and cities of southeastern Sicily, particularly the Val di Noto, in a uniform late style that has become known as Sicilian Baroque. Many of these towns now form part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto."
(images, top right: the Cathedral of Noto; bottom right: Church of San Domenico, Noto.
lower left: Sant'Agata Cathedral in Catania -#3 photo credit Berthold Werner)
Val di Noto
encompasses the south-eastern third of Sicily.
Historically, it was one of the three valli of
Sicily. That is not the same as valle in
Italian or "valley" in English. It is best translated
as province, district, maybe something like the
English suffix -shire. It's from the Arabic Wali.
The oldest recorded settlement in the Val di Noto was
the ancient town of Akrai, near Palazzolo Acreide,
founded in 664 BC. It
was the first colony of the Greek Corinthian
settlement at Syracuse. In other
words, a "second generation" colony of the spread of
Magna Graecia —Greeks
from Corinth moved to Italy and founded Syracuse and they,
in turn, sent out settlers to found towns in the Val
di Noto. 
After
the great quake of 1693 many towns were rebuilt on
entirely new sites, such as Noto. The rulers of the
time, the kings of Spain (southern Italy was a Spanish
vice-realm), granted authority to redesign the damaged
towns. The first new buildings were in both the
Renaissance and Baroque styles. The new towns were
redesigned to have a town square in the center and to
spread out in a radial pattern. Major buildings like
churches, cloisters and palaces were built as focal
points for the new streets, and the streets themselves
were laid out in a grid pattern. The towns have come
to be known as "Sicilian Baroque", the most
notable of which is the town of Noto, itself. In June
2002, UNESCO inscribed the towns of the Val di Noto on
the World Heritage List as "representing the
culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in
Europe". The listed towns are Caltagirone, Militello
in Val di Catania, Catania, Modica, Noto, Palazzolo
Acreide, Ragusa, and Scicli. © 2002 - 2023