Last Friday with Jamie in town (she had been working in Italy and Spain for her job with GoPro), we decided to rent a car and drive to Otranto on the Adriatic coast.  It turned out to be the worst weather day we have had since we arrived in Italy a month ago.  As the Italians said, it was “brutto” (ugly).

One of the places we wanted to go was the Laghetto Cave di Bauxite (picture below).  It is a small lake ringed in red bauxite ore that turns into a sticky gooey mess when it gets wet.  It had rained a little before we got there but once we got out to walk around, it started to pour.  You can imagine what our shoes looked like.  We had to take extra special care not to completely ruin the carpet in the rental car.  When we told the rental place where we had been, they suddenly wanted to reinspect the car to make sure we had not done any damage.

With the bad weather and it being a Friday we many of the places to ourselves, but we didn’t want to spend too much time out of the car.  We drove completely around the lower Salentine peninsula from Otranto on the Adriatic to Gallipoli on the Ionian and had lunch in Santa Maria di Leuca, the very tip of the peninsula.  It sits n the dividing line between the two seas.  It seems like the end of the earth.

The grotto just outside of Castro is supposed to be spectacular and there are tours available.  We will save that for a not-so-rainy day.

But this picture tells the story