We have been using the Road Trips Italy book published by DK books to help guide us. It has been in François since our first visit to Italy. It had a small mention of the city of Otranto as one of its stops, and since we were only about 40 kilometers from Otranto we decided to head there before moving on to our planned stop for the day in Gallipoli.
From the description we did not expect much of Otranto, maybe a small fishing village with a cute waterfront. So we were pleasantly surprised with what we actually found there. It turns out Otranto has a very nice old town dominated by a castle built when it was part of Aragon in Spain. The fort is very impressive and well preserved. We did not tour the interior because we have turned into castle snobs and will not pay an entrance fee for just any castle. But we did enjoy walking along the walls.
The old town had lots of shops and restaurants and was fairly bustling with a mixture of tourists, but here it was mostly foreign tourists, not Italian. We were hustling thru town because when we arrived I did not expect the town to be this interesting and I had only put 2 hours on the meter in the parking lot. Also, we were on the edge of a thunderstorm and it was raining a bit.
About 20 minutes into exploring Otranto I told Ton that I was enjoying myself more here than I did in Lecce. She agreed, Lecce is a far more important city both in the past and today, but it did not connect with us the way the little backwater town of Otranto did.
Our two hours were nearly up so we had to hustle back to François. We stopped at one more interesting art piece near the port. It is a monument to displaced persons commissioned by the town in the early 2000’s. In the 1980’s an Albanian naval patrol boat with about 100 people on board was trying to defect to Italy. Before it could safely reach Italy it was sunk, and over 80 people died. The boat was salvaged and brought to Otranto where the town commissioned a Greek artist to make it into a monument to refugees. It is a very interesting work that we both enjoyed.
We were pleasantly surprised that our 60 kilometer drive to Gallipoli was almost entirely on freeways. We arrived at the Agritourismo which is a campground on a farm earlier than planned, but almost immediately decided to stay 2 days instead of the one planned because we liked the vibe of the place.
We were planning to go into town today, but there was a big thunderstorm brewing off in the distance so we decided to wait until tomorrow. Of course the storm blew out to sea without touching us or the town. But we did get a nice sunset from the campground to reward us for our caution.
