Our plan is to split the next two stages, each a touch over 30kms, into three days.
18km, About 5 hours with rests; it is mild and cloudy
Highlights – the grand piazza, castle and gate of the Renaissance village of Acaya.
We leave Lecce past the amphitheatre and out along the walls of the castle.
It is about 6kms through the streets of Lecce, out into the countryside and into the town of Merine, where we stopped for a morning tea break at Bar Soleluna.
Out of the town and past the huge roundabout – roundabouts do tend to make me nervous. As an Aussie, the traffic direction is confusing, so I tend to cross these with my head in a spin – left and right, left and right, and sometimes add in a full twirl to ensure I am taking it all in. Thankfully, the large roundabout has clear pedestrian crossings points, and, yes, the traffic stopped for us at each of the four crossing points.
It is a pretty quiet route along the road towards Acaya, through farmland with Pajari, past abandoned buildings, and crumbling stone walls.
It is a bit over three hours from the start of our day until we are greeted by the castle of Acaya. We stop again for a break here, in the large piazza, where we get a very warm welcome at the lovely bar, The Barbera, including a VF stamp.
It is another 6kms of a predominantly quiet road to Vernole. We see more evidence of diseased olive trees, but also a lot of cause for hope with a lot of new planting underway.
There is one major point of confusion for us regarding some more constructed stone walls – we cannot for the life of us work out why we have often seen them built with plastic bottles inserted into them …
The churches of Vernole certainly continue the Baroque theme, where too much decoration is never enough.
Stay – la Corte di Edoardo. A beautiful place, with a fantastic breakfast, and snacks available, a lovely garden and extremely comfortable room.
Unfortunately, we again came to a halt, as DC that evening started to feel unwell. We had definitely picked up some virus which first had DC in bed for a day feeling really under the weather, then myself just a bit out of sorts the following day. (RAT negative).
Two more days lost. As the news in the lead up to Christmas was warning people that there were a lot of bugs circulating, not just covid, it wasn’t a surprise that something found us eventually. We honestly could not have been in a better place though to pass a couple of lazy days recovering, with an extremely comfortable bed, and home-made meals kindly dropped off for us. Grazie mille.
Richo and DC 