Salento, the southern territory of Apulia comprising the provinces of Lecce, Brindisi, and that south of Taranto, is situated between the Adriatic Sea to the east and the Ionian Sea to the west. The Salento landscape has some distinctive features, such as the fact that it is an almost everywhere cultivated territory, with vegetation mostly consisting of expanses of centuries-old olive trees, with large, twisted trunks, and in which the land is separated by typical dry stone walls. Very often, one can find masserie fortified and unfortified, but also the so-called cuneddhre, small religious buildings, also located in the countryside, with the image of the saint inside. The towns of the Salento area, generally sparsely populated, are characterized by the intense white of the buildings, typical of “a calce” houses, dwellings generally without roofs, with attics, especially in the countryside and on the coast, in contrast to the warm pinkish yellow of the “pietra leccese“,typical precisely of Salento. The countryside, on the other hand, is dominated by the reddish color of the soil due to the high presence of iron. The sea, on the other hand, is characterized by a dark blue color if one looks out from the cliffs of the Adriatic Sea, and emerald green, greenish, and light blue if observed from the sandy beaches or the low cliffs of the Ionian Sea.

The cultivation of theolivetree and thus the production of theoil, in Salento, has a very ancient tradition and had as its center of origin the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the olive tree first appeared in Syria, then spread to the Greek islands, Asia Minor, mainland Greece, and finally, between the seventh and eighth centuries BC, arrived in Salento, thanks to the Phoenicians. However, it was the Greeks who were the first to transform thewildolive tree into a cultivated one, partly because theolive tree in Greece was considered a sacred plant and thereforeoil was widely used not only as food, but also in funerary rites or awards.

Theolive tree is an evergreen, deciduous tree whose vegetative activity is almost continuous with attenuation in the winter period. It has slow growth and is very long-lived: under favorable climatic conditions an olive tree can become millennial, and reach heights of 15-20 meters. The plant starts fruiting around the 3rd-4th year, begins full productivity around the 9th-10th year, and maturity is reached after the age of 50. The roots, mostly adventitious, are expanded and shallow, and the stem is cylindrical and twisted, with hard, heavy wood. The harvest period for the fruit, olives, is from October to December, which depends on the cultivars and the use to be made: whether for oil or for table.

For the Salento economy,olive growing has always played a role of primary importance, which also contributed to the development of many port cities, and as early as the late 1500s and early 1600s Gallipoli grew so much that it was recognized as Europe’s largest oil trading place, to such an extent that it was given the privilege of setting the cost of oil from year to year, in exchange for which merchants offered leather, linen, sugar, lumber and iron. Even the scraps ofoil processing and the less valuable qualities were useful for soap production, hence the importance of the frequent exchanges with Marseille, the European capital of soap precisely.

Salento’s olive groves gained even more importance in the eighteenth century thanks to the economic policy of John of Bourbon, who encouraged olive cultivation by promising landowners a reduction in taxes in return. The export of the oil ensured great wealth for its producers, but actually also considerable earnings for the state coffers.

Winemaking, on the other hand, has undergone a commercial explosion in the last two decades since the Salento wine, once useful only as a blending wine to increase the alcohol content of northern wines, began to be used as a full-bodied but refined table wine. The best-known wines of the area are Primitivo, Negroamaro, and RosatodelSalento. The Congedi oil mill offers Negroamaro Rosso and Negroamaro Rosato, Primitivo Rosso, and Vermentino Bianco among its wines.

La Salento cuisine consists of numerous traditional dishes, mainly based on vegetables and fish, and is accompanied by famous and fine DOC wines, such as those mentioned above. Among the best-known traditional dishes are pezzetti, a stew of horse meat in spicy sauce; pitta di patate, a low potato pizza topped with onions, turnips, and tomatoes; then again puccia, but also rustico, a thin pastry baked in the oven containing a mixture of béchamel, mozzarella, and tomato. Another typical food from all over Apulia are friseddhe or frise, doughnuts made of bread biscuits to a very hard consistency, often made with barley grain and cut in half horizontally, which must be softened by brief immersion in water and then seasoned with tomato, olive oil, salt and oregano, and finally pittule, coarse-shaped fritters filled with turnips, squash blossoms, codfish or without filling soaked in cooked wine.