The artisans of Lecce

If you'd rather know what you're buying up front, visit the Mostra Permanente dell'Artigianato, just off the main Piazza S. Oronzo, which acts as a communal showcase for artisans from across the region (Via Rubichi 21, Lecce, tel. +39-0832-246-758, www.mostrartigianato.le.it). The setting couldn't be blander: a large modern room, harsh florescent lighting, walls lined with shelves, and small tables scattered haphazardly. But the hand-painted ceramics, wrought-iron candlesticks, stone carvings, and other handiworks are beautiful and brilliant—and, since this is a city-run enterprise, there's no markup. There's also no sales pitch, no hustle, and no bargaining; in fact, the entire staff usually consists of just the bottle-blond woman at the cash desk, who hand-tatts lace while waiting for customers. The only craft item in short supply at the Mostra Permanente is the one for which Lecce has been famous since the seventeenth century: cartapesta (papier-mâché). Most of the cartapesta workshops scattered all around town do a brisk business cranking out life-size saints, crucifixions, and crèche scenes for churches and chapels around the world. After molding the wet sheets of grayish-beige paper around giant, featureless mannequins made of wire and straw, most artisans drag the rough statues into the street and stand them next to a coal-stoked brazier for the next step. The brazier bristles with iron rods of various sizes and configurations, their ends shoved into the coals until they glow, at which point the maestro plucks them out and uses them to press, sculpt, and burn delicate details into the clothing and faces. Every time he touches the red-hot iron to the paper bodies, it sends up licks of flame and billows of acrid smoke, as if the saint or Savior were being tormented in one of those Hell scenes so popular in medieval Italian mosaics and frescoes. Cartapesta workshops tend to look unsettlingly crammed with charred corpses—until the artisans finally apply thick layers of paint to cover the scars and rough, twisted paper. Since a six-foot St. Francis won't fit into a carry-on, visit the tiny studio of Maurizio Cianfano, who specializes in foot-high figurines of 19th-century peasants (Via C. Russi 10, Lecce, tel. 011-39-333-799-3906). Constantly grinning under his close-cropped hair, Maurizio wears surgical gloves and a work-spattered white doctor's coat as he practices his own special technique that doesn't involve Lecce's usual hot pokers or other instruments of medieval torture. His workbench is surrounded by shelves crowded with pots of paint, bowls brimming with a selection of pre-crafted clay heads, and regiments of unfinished straw bodies wrapped into human shapes by a haphazard webbing of thread. Onto these, Maurizio crafts flowing, papier-mâché clothing, paints in the details, and finally attaches the peasant's burden: a bundle of sticks across the back, a pile of wood under the arm, and sometimes a jug of wine for the free hand.