San Matteo

San Matteo tickets: which one to buy

San Matteo stands in the southern part of the old centre of Lecce, a few minutes from the main square and away from the busiest streets, and it is free to enter. Walking tours of the city include it on the longer routes; the short ones concentrate on the great church of Santa Croce, the Roman amphitheatre and the cathedral square, all of which are the obvious priorities. This church is the one to add if you want to understand how strange the local baroque became.

Tours dealing with the stone itself, which is soft enough to carve like wood and hardens in the air, take in workshops where it is still worked and are worth an hour. Lecce is an easy base for the Salento coast and most visitors use it as one. Nothing needs booking, and the church keeps a long midday closure like everything else in the town. Lecce stone darkens with age, so the newer restorations on the front are visibly paler than the rest.

Visiting San Matteo: what to see

The church was built from 1667 and finished around the turn of the century, and its front is the reason to make the walk. Instead of the flat facade normal in the region, the lower storey bulges outward in a convex curve while the upper storey pulls back into a concave one, so the whole front moves as you approach it along the street. The lower half is faced with pyramidal bosses, an unusual and slightly aggressive texture, and the niches on the upper level hold statues of the apostles, several of them left unfinished when the money ran out.

The plan inside is elliptical, an idea taken from Roman churches of the previous generation and rare this far south. Gilded altars line the walls and the local limestone has weathered to a warm yellow. The whole building is a provincial answer to Borromini, made by craftsmen rather than a famous architect. Twelve niches on the upper storey were meant to hold a full set of apostles, and four of them are still empty.

San Matteo opening hours and the best time to go

Lecce is hot from June to September and the old centre is largely unshaded; the streets empty between one and five and fill again in the evening, when the stone glows under floodlights and the passeggiata fills the squares. That is the right time for a first look at the facades, and the morning for going inside. The church closes at midday. Spring and autumn are ideal.

Holy Week brings processions through the old town, and the patronal feast of Saint Oronzo in late August fills the main square with lights and music for several days. Trains from Bari take under two hours and the station is a ten-minute walk from the centre. A car is needed for the coast but a nuisance in town. Twenty minutes inside is enough, and the walk between churches is the real pleasure. The papier-mache workshops the town is known for cluster in the streets behind the church and welcome visitors.