A brief guide for people who have got lost in the magic theatre of leccese baroque...
but no longer want to find the way home...
The stone that a traveller finds when he arrives in Salento is one that has been worked upon into a thousand forms by man and nature. It can be found in the numerous menhirs, in the mysterious petrified dunes that drop sharply into the sea at the cliffs of S. Andrea, and in the lookout towers, used to warn of attacks by the Turks, which punctuate the whole of the coast line. This is the stone of the old towns, of the churches, of the architect-sculptors who from the sixteenth century onwards brought this "poor" raw material into the decoration of a theatre. The latter is inhabited by smiling cherubs and angels, by caryatids and herms, twisted columns and infinite festoons and garlands. The architect-sculptors designed streets like the backdrop of a stage capable of amazing and enchanting the newcomer like a mermaid's song... This stone, which has given work daily to untold nameless armies of master builders and skilled stonemasons, comes out of the Salentine ground which has hidden it for thousand of years, like a treasure submerged under the sea (an image which is not so much metaphorical as real, given that it is sedimentary rock from the sea bottom whit biological fragments of animal hulls, sand and shell, all mixed up, compressed and petrified). The fine grain, mixed together with little traces of clay or salt crystals once dissolved in the sea, is in fact not solidly cohesive and therefore easy to sculpt with chisels and tempered steel gouges, quite different from marble and other more correctly named calcareous rocks (not to mention granite rock) which all present greater hardness, shades of colour, duration in time and require different techniques, stages and times of working. Salento also produces these types of rock, for example those quarried in Surbo, Soleto and Santa Cesarea, but the most commonly found is undoubtedly the "CALCARENITE" of the Miocene period (the "LECCISO" mentioned earlier), also in the variety known as "CARPARO", with shades of orange, more open-grained and harder. The texture of the grains of leccese rock is broken here and there by the presence of fossils (vertebrates, long bones, shells, exoskeletons, teeth) and the rock has uniform light tones without striations or veins similar to those of marble and of alabaster ; only a trained eye can read the pale lines of sedimentation or the parts of different cohesion and hardness compared to others, due to internal subsiding or to the actions of re-mixing the material in progressive moments of the geological history of the layers. The composition itself of the material exalts its advantages (easy to work) and its defects (easily eroded): the atmospheric agents that strike the external surfaces mechanically (rain, hail, accumulation of snow) particularly damage the more sculptured and exposed parts, undermining the cohesion of the grains themselves (already under acoustic pressure from the noises of the town) ; natural physical agents like the damp, which rises from the ground, and the persistence of water in the stone, because of phenomena such as capillarity, deprive the stone of its soluble compounds, weakening the structure itself. The question of smog needs to be taken much more seriously : the unburned gases of cars and motorbikes, and above all the presence of sulphuric anhydride and sulphurous anhydride in the air, the phenomen known as acid rain, change the extremely hard carbonates into sulphates (thus into chalk); besides, the presence of carbon oxide changes the carbonates into bicarbonates, which are extremely soluble : and in this way, what had survived three or four centuries or longer is being swept away almost under our eyes. These processes that have been described lead to the honeycomb and/or the cleavage of parallel layers of the stone, which can be easily be observed anywhere. A completely different question is that of the natural darkening of the stone, due to the processes of oxidisation, of growth and drying of the crytogamous vegetation of seaweed, fungi and lichen, which protect the covered surface from any decay and give it a pleasing ancient-looking patina.
Francesco Vitiello