Make a detour here for a glimpse of the other Salentina, the wine-and-olive-oil country, away from the coast, where corrupt Greek, not Italian, is spoken. Several small towns dotted along the Lecce-Otranto inland route (State Highway: 16) have populations who descend from refugees of the medieval Byzantine wars. One village is Calimera – Greek for ‘good morning’, possibly getting its name from the new comers’ courteous reply when asked where they came from. In a sense the aliens were coming home, for local museums display marbles from a 4thC BC Attic colony.

Culture shock is a constant hazard in these superficially unremarkable townships. You do a double-tako at the sight of Corigliano’s 16thC castle, the Do’ Monti, so handsomely fronted with heraldic carvings and elaborate statues in niches that you suspect it to be a Venetian villa mysteriously translated 1,000 km south. Much of Salentina has its outcrops of pseudo-Palladian and Baroque flamboyance. The princely palaces, relics of feudal grandeur, are never as grand as they first appear to be. Behind magnificent facades these great houses are insignificant enough.