Holidays SANTA MARIA DI LEUCA, Lecce, Apulia south Italy

Leuca, hamlet of Castrignano del Capo, is a seaside resort that spreads out from Punta Meliso to Punta Ristola.

It appears to a visitor like a basin that slopes gently down to the sea, a lively and varied sea in which the borderline between west and east, present and past, history and legend, becomes imperceptible.

It was an old Messapic town and the seat of Municipium during the Roman Age.

Leuca is a Greek name that means “the white (town)”: so it appeared lit up by the sun to people coming from the sea.

Near the little centre there is Capo Santa Maria, the extreme eastern cape of the peninsula that is the gulf between the Adriatic sea and the Ionian Sea.

On this big rock there is the Shrine of Santa Maria di Leuca, or De Finibus Terrae, perhaps built on an old temple of the goddess Minerva. At the entrance of the shrine there is a Latin inscription that reminds of the past pagan cult: “where once sacrifices were offered to Minerva, today offerings for Mary mother of God are collected”.

The Shrine has a significant value because it’s built “in the extreme south of the world” and then it opposes another famous place of cult that has the same name, Finisterre: it stands in the other side of the Old World, in the extreme north-west in Brittany, on the cape of the old harbour of Brest.

By the sides of the large square in front of the Shrine there is a stone cross that reminds of the Jubilee pilgrimage done in 1900. According to tradition this land has been benefited also from the passing of St. Peter, that is reminded by the high column with a Corinthian capital built in 1694.

From then on there were many famous visitors of these places, from St. Francis of Assisi to Pope John Paul II who raised the Shrine to the rank of Minor Papal Basilica.