PRESS CONFERENCE

PUGLIA CROSSROADS OF THE MEDTERRANEAN – Mobility of people, goods and culture

This year, the Jewish Museum in Lecce will once again commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, an event which has been held there every year since the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The significance of this event is twofold, as it serves to both commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and raise awareness of the horrors of Nazi genocide.

Housed in the site of the building known as Palazzo Personè, fully inserted in the baroque context of the district opposite the basilica of Santa Croce, the museum was born from the joint effort of private individuals who wanted to bring to light the surviving traces of medieval Lecce for the benefit of visitors, both local and foreign. With this in mind, the facility, opened in May 2016 on the site of the synagogue in the medieval Jewish quarter, aims to be a container for all those aspects of the city obliterated at the time of the heavy urban renewal that began, in Lecce and the Salento region, at the same time as the final expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom of Naples (1541).

In a land, Puglia, which due to its peculiar geographic position has always been at the centre of the movement of men and ideas, the trafficking of goods and the confrontation of cultures, since ancient times the local populations have had to confront, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, people from ‘elsewhere’. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Goths, Lombards, Saracens, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragons, Spaniards, Jews, Ottomans, Slavs, Albanians, French and Venetians alternated, for more or less long periods, in this territory until the Unification of Italy, after which the region did not stop being a land of emigration and immigration.

To modern travellers, eager to rediscover their past and compare their own with other histories, to those who wish to rediscover lost memories of past generations, the exhibition is dedicated. Like the mediaeval itineraries, it is intended to be a viaticum to accustom the visitor to material traces, aspects of daily life, traditions that, at present, are not so conspicuous and do not allow one to connect with the past at first glance. Certainly, today Puglia is less and less a land of passage to go elsewhere, a springboard to Europe to venture long distances overseas; today's ‘pilgrims’ are ‘tourists’ who mostly want to visit its vast territory and get to know its many attractions.

Perhaps the loss of the complex ethnic composition and varied religious components that had characterised medieval Puglia is one of the most significant features of this region's transition into the modern age. For historical and political reasons, this very area, which in the Middle Ages represented one of the centres, not only geographically but also intellectually, of the Mediterranean, became a periphery of the ‘West’ from the modern age onwards, a "finis Terrae" of the Christian world, beyond which one ran the risk of running into the infidel enemy, not only the Turk (real or imaginary) but also the Jew, the different from the overwhelming majority. The territory, however, retains - in its town planning, architecture, civil and religious, art, traditions, cuisine, dialects and aspects of daily life that constitute the different regional cultural identities - traces of these transitions and their contributions over the centuries.

The exhibition, curated by Fabrizio Lelli – associate professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, director of the Jewish Museum of Lecce – and Fabrizio Ghio – freelance architect, archaeologist, member of the scientific committee of the Jewish Museum of Lecce - aims to help the visitor, a modern pilgrim, to make a journey in the region not only spatially but, above all, temporally.