La Poesia

On the low limestone coast of the Salento, the Grotta della Poesia is a natural pool of startling clarity: a near-elliptical basin of turquoise sea water, open to the sky and walled by pale rock, linked to the Adriatic by an underwater passage. It is in fact one of two neighbouring karst caves, about 60 metres apart, whose roofs collapsed long ago. The larger, roughly 30 by 18 metres, lies some thirty metres from the open sea; the smaller Poesia Piccola, about 15 by 9 metres, sits around seventy metres inland. In both, the sea enters through a channel that can be swum or passed in a small boat.

The name has nothing to do with verse. It derives from the local word posia, which comes from the Greek for a spring of fresh water, though the more poetic form is the one that stuck. The cave's real distinction is archaeological. In 1983 the archaeologist Cosimo Pagliara of the University of Lecce found its walls covered with inscriptions, mostly in Messapic, the language of the pre-Roman people of the heel of Italy, but also in Greek and Latin. They showed that the cave had been a sanctuary of a god called Taotor. Together with inscriptions found on the Albanian coast across the strait, they have been read as evidence of regular crossings over the roughly 80 km of sea separating the two shores in antiquity.

The caves lie within Roca Vecchia, one of the most important archaeological sites in southern Apulia. Excavations have uncovered massive Bronze Age fortifications of the 15th to 11th centuries BC, burned and rebuilt more than once, with finds recalling Minoan and Aegean models, and a later Messapian town of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, probably the place known in Latin as Thuria Sallentina. On the headland stand the ruins of a medieval citadel attributed to Walter of Brienne in the 14th century and a coastal watchtower built in 1568, when the town had already been abandoned; its people moved inland to found Roca Nuova around 1480, after raids from the sea. A 17th-century sanctuary of the Madonna di Roca completes the scene.

Getting there

Roca Vecchia is on the Adriatic coast in the municipality of Melendugno, between San Foca and Torre dell'Orso, about 23 km from Lecce. The nearest airport is Brindisi Airport (BDS), about 58 km away.