"and white will return
for a moment to shine with lime,
burnt and concrete queen
of these humble places where you end,
meanly, Italy, in a little water fight
at the foot of a lighthouse.
It is here that the Salento people return
with their hats after their deaths ".
Leuca, end of the world, end of the earth that becomes peninsula, where everybody must choose, above the infinite staircases overlooking two seas, the Adriatic and Ionian ones, that mix in perennial conflict.
Leuca has no other function than that: no sinking blinding ridges, no beaches and marine ravines of divine transparency, no nineteenth-century villas of the Salento nobility, the nearby Pescoluse, "Maldives of Salento", "caseddhi" peasant. Only the choice between two watery hemispheres that give birth to everything, there in the waves in front of the viewer, light and sinister crests that stretch like rubber at this moment for all the moments of life. We are here to choose, in Leuca «de finibus terrae», as Latins used to say, in Leuca the end of all lives.
Here is the Lighthouse beyond which there is nothing. Here is the Madonna del Santuario projected into the sky by the violence of a Corinthian capital. The whole of Leuca is dominated from above and in the name, from the Greek "leucos", white, shows already its horizon made of white limestone rocks. It is the lighthouse, 47 meters high, standing on Punta Meliso, among the most important ones in Italy, dominate the bay where the village stands. On the waterfront there are the elegant aristocratic houses and art nouveau villas, with the blue friezes of Villa Episcopo, the Moorish extravagances of Villa Daniele and the fantasies of Villa La Meridiana.
Near the lighthouse, we meet the Basilica of Santa Maria de Finibus Terrae, a characteristic place of devotion overlooking the sea, while, a short walk from the Sanctuary, ends the Apulian Aqueduct, with a suggestive monumental waterfall, flanked by a staircase with two flights, inaugurated with great fanfare during the twenty years and now open only on exceptional occasions.
The jagged coastline of Leuca is part of the Regional Natural Park Costa Otranto - Santa Maria di Leuca - Bosco di Tricase and it is embellished with natural caves, all reachable by sea: the local fishermen know the legends backwards and forwards.
Leuca - nobody in the kingdom calls it Santa Maria di Leuca - is a small plot of land in the properties of Castrignano del Capo, a municipality with whom an "open dialogue" persists. The scirocco imbues it, it is surrounded by villas: the Mellacqua turrita, San Giovanni, Meridiana, Episcopo. The "bagnarole" made of wood for summer amusements were destroyed long ago and just a few masonry survivors celebrate the ladies who owned an exclusive slice of sea.
The caves are still there, cradles of Palaeolithic finds, Latin and Greek inscriptions, like shining eyes of the sea. There is the so-called Devil's one because it roars, the phantasmagoric trio of the Cazzafri, and the Child with the prehistoric remains of an elephant and a rhinoceros, and the Giants, and the Nativity, and when the sun agonizes on the horizon all of them compete to drink the gleams that spread like blood for vampires on the cliff. Inside, there is the Omo Tower, named after a man who died watching the arrival of the Turks and the Saracens, with the ancient port of fishermen down below. And from up there, from the top of the lighthouse, you can realize that here is the point from which everything begins.
The Finis Terrae sanctuary was built on an ancient temple dedicated to the goddess Minerva. The passage from the ancient pagan cult to Christianity is testified by an inscription placed at the entrance of the sanctuary. According to a popular legend, visiting the sanctuary is the first step to access the Paradise. Inside there is an original fragment of the painting of the Madonna and Child which was partially burned by Saracens incursions and now, restored and complete, is placed on the west wall of the transept.
The Church has a single Latin cross nave with the main altar with the image of the Virgin. There are also six other altars dedicated to several saints. At the end of the nave there is a stone pulpit with a panel where the coat of arms of Bishop Giannelli appears as well as the representation of a scene of the collapse of the temple with the image of St. Peter. In front of the sanctuary, a tall column with a Corinthian capital and with a stone cross on the top, recalls the Jubilee pilgrimage of 1900 and the passage of St. Peter. From the churchyard of Maria de finibus terrae, the horizon is dominated by blue and green, interpreted as an expression of the celestial and vital lymph called viriditas according to medieval mysticism. In this "antechamber of Paradise", as the Leuca inhabitants call it, a miraculous mystical power lurks. Once this spirituality is perceived, we surely understand that we will no longer forget Leuca.
