A trip to Salento is more than just discovering a place but a unique opportunity to rethink oneself, as Carmelo Bene argued.
The Salento peninsula, the last fragment of the West stretching toward the East, is a place imbued with a unique atmosphere, where time seems to slow down, and ancient walls tell stories thousands of years old. Here the peoples of the Mediterranean met and mingled, and today their imprint is still visible in the stones and culture of this land, it appears like a bridge suspended toward other continents, a place that is almost no longer Europe but is still not Asia, Africa, the Middle East.
In Salento everything seems to languish in a sense of suspension, constant heat that pushes toward the search for shade also understood as a moment of contemplation and reflection. There is nothing better than Salento, then, for those who feel the need for a break, to interrupt the frenetic pace of modern life and rethink themselves within it.
It is no coincidence that one of its most illustrious sons, Carmelo Bene, called Salento the land of “depensamento“. A multifaceted artist and intellectual, nonconformist and visionary, now also widely reevaluated as a man of literature as well as theatre, Bene grew up between Campi Salentina and Lecce but remained tied throughout his life to the places of his father’s old home in Santa Cesarea Terme – a paradise overlooking the cliff 15 minutes from the historical Don Totu residence – to the point of electing nearby Otranto as a “buen retiro” to bring his last works to completion.
Carmelo Bene was able to capture and describe with extraordinary acuity the mysterious and fascinating aura that envelops Salento. He did so by precisely coining the concept of “depensamento“, or that condition of suspension of thought that according to the artist defines Salentinity and from which he drew to create his visionary art. According to Bene, the geographical remoteness, and the condition of extreme periphery (Finibus Terrae, the ancient Romans called it) offer Salento the unique opportunity for “depensamento“: where the dominant, normalizing thought does not arrive, there poetry, ecstasy and wonder are born free. A paradigm embodied to perfection by the figure of St. Joseph of Copertino (visit the evocative Sanctuary of the Grottella: it is only a half-hour drive from Don Totu), the saint of flights to whom Carmelo Bene dedicated several studies: “To this crippled South, all that remains is to fly“, he wrote speaking of him.
Slowing down your pace, suspending your routine, freeing your thoughts from all chains: a trip to Salento is much more than simply discovering a place. It is an opportunity to first reconsider oneself, surrender to calm and re-establish the hierarchies of one’s daily routine, perhaps contemplating a dreamlike sunset or a surreal landscape. Like that of Villa Sticchi in Santa Cesarea Terme, for example, a gem of late 19th-century eclectic architecture chosen by Carmelo Bene as the setting for Moresco Palace in his Nostra Signora dei Turchi, a famous film based on the book of the same name.
“If the Moresco Palace were real…“, reflects the narrator at one point in the film, as if to suggest that the vision of the palace might spring from a hallucination, be a mirage. And indeed, those who see Villa Sticchi for the first time find it hard to believe they are in Salento. The purple-red dome, the vaults of the arches, everything seems to leave one believing that one has been catapulted to some exotic destination in the East, perhaps right into the Ottoman Empire of the Saracens. Its location, then, with the Lecce stone loggia opening directly onto the cliff, makes it a magnificent vantage point of the horizon, synthesizing the essence of Salento as a frontier land: a limit, but also an overlook to what lies on the other side of the sea.
Salento’s location in the extreme south – “South of the South of the Saints” to quote Carmelo Bene again – and its geographical condition as a peninsula, make it a land from which one does not pass by chance but where one goes by a precise choice, by the will to seek relaxation away from the ordinary flow of thoughts that suffocates contemporary living.
Under the blinding light of the sun, in front of the flickering reflections on the sea, the experience of travelling in Salento reveals itself for what it really is: not a trivial journey in places but first and foremost within oneself, an aesthetic-ecstatic journey in which to savour the elsewhere rediscovering oneself more alive than ever.