Serendipity at Otranto

The seaside town of Otranto occupies an interesting spot: the easternmost extremity of Italy, a peninsula that juts almost exactly far eastward as it does southward. Significantly and coincidentally, the town’s name is linked to that of Horace Walpole, who invented Gothic literature (long before Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker) with his Castle of Otranto, but also the word serendipity, which means something that is, ahem, both significant and coincidental. There seems to be something in the water (and the land adjoining it) in that patch of the Italian bootheel: Lecce is renowned for its effortlessly elaborate Baroque, hewn from honey gold sandstone. And the eclectic villas and houses around Otranto and Lecce call to mind Arabian palaces, where lightfoot Aladdins and clever Sheherazades tread sinuous staircases and moonlit courtyards. Orientalist fairytale meets the algorithmic inventivity of chance in Antonio Pepe’s tour through the “timeless Baroque” of Salento’s architectural gems.