Are you still undecided about the destination of your next summer vacation?
Then let’s try to tease you with a selection of five books that will make you crave the crystal clear sea, golden beaches, picturesque villages and history of a magical land: the Salento.
Staying at Tenuta Rocci Cerasoli, surrounded by lush nature and within walking distance of the region’s most beautiful attractions, you can easily see with your own eyes and touch with your own hands the wonders you will discover between the pages of the five literary masterpieces we are about to recommend.

1. Sciamenescià by Carlos Solito (Elliot, 2016)

If you are planning to come to Puglia, pack Sciamenesciá right away and pay attention to its pages: between the lines, you will find a not-to-be-missed itinerary through an unseen Puglia, a portrait of scenarios, people and situations of a reality that eternally smacks of controra, limbo and slow time, where everything has the sweet taste of dormancy. The gaze of Carlos Solito – a Grottaglie-born writer, photographer, journalist and filmmaker – imagines El Paiso, an imaginary village of a stray and irreverent Salento, made of stony peels, unforgiving sun, choruses of cicadas, houses dyed with lime milk and masserie farms emerging like islands from the sea of olive trees. With a beat, instinctive register made of humor and lightness, Solito tells us about the men and women who inhabit its sunny streets: “Sciamenescià”, a quintessential dialectal incitement that invites you to get moving, is the incipit of the journey into a hidden but absolutely real Apulia.

2. The War of the Cafonians by Carlo D’Amicis (Minimum Fax, 2008).

Summer 1975. In an imaginary village on the Salento coast without yet the shadow of a tourist, the class clash is renewed, pitting the well-off youth against the children of fishermen, shepherds, and peasants: the so-called cafoni. The feelings and impulses that grow in their adolescent souls jar with the separation of good and evil that they had always advocated, spinning the tale in a thousand different directions like a pinball ball gone mad, in the grip of a collective and inner turmoil. Through this microcosm of unmitigated, free and carefree kids, Carlo D’Amicis draws a portrait of the change that transfigured our country in those years somewhere between chivalric poem and social satire, coming-of-age novel and pulp divertissement, the tragedy of the old bourgeoisie and the comedy of modern Italy. Absolutely unmissable, like the film of the same name it inspired.

3. The Letter Carrier by Francesca Giannone (North, 2023)

It was a true literary case of 2023, a best seller in bookstores all over Italy and winner of the prestigious Bancarella Prize 2023.
Set in Lizzanello in 1934, La Portalettere is the story of Anna, a proud and edgy Northern woman who moves to Salento for love of her husband Carlo. Anna is for everyone “the foreigner,” who does not bend to local customs and traditions and who will even win a competition at the Post Office, becoming the first postmistress in Lizzanello and triggering the outrage of the town. A town, however, that in the next twenty years will be forced to come to terms with war, feminist claims as well as the loves and secrets of the inhabitants of which the courageous Anna will become an invisible thread. Even of those that concern her….

4. L’Ora di Tutti by Maria Corti (Bompiani, 1962)

An absolute masterpiece by Maria Corti, a Milanese writer in love with Salento since childhood. The novel takes place in Otranto, in the summer of 1480, the one in which the galleys of the Saracens, ready to lay siege to and conquer the city, appeared on the horizon of the Adriatic Sea. The novel follows the unfolding of the various phases of the battle, from the assault to the valiant resistance to the final surrender, with the looks and words of five characters involved in the story. Five interwoven narratives told in the first person by the various protagonists linked to each other by various events. After reading this cornerstone of twentieth-century Italian literature, you will never again look with the same eyes at the old town of Otranto, whose toponymy recalls those sad events and in whose cathedral still triumphs the pride of the 800 martyrs sacrificed to the absurd and still sadly topical violence of war: “Everyone’s hour is that hour that, sooner or later, happens to everyone in life: that hour in which everyone can prove to himself and to others that he is worth something.”

5. La Luna dei Borboni by Vittorio Bodini (Edizioni della Meridiana, 1952)

“You don’t know the South, the lime houses / from which we came out in the sun like numbers / from the face of a dice“: these are the opening lines of Vittorio Bodini’s La luna dei Borboni, one of the most original and innovative poetic collections of the postwar period with which we want to conclude this list of literary suggestions to inspire your Salento summer. It is a book of just 64 pages with 28 lyrics that at the time represented an absolute revolution in the conception of poetry in Italy. Bodini, in fact, distanced himself from the closures of hermeticism but at the same time rejected the excesses of neorealism, thus opening up to the real without renouncing the fantastic, symbolic, surreal component. Twenty-eight poems that will make you yearn for the genuine South, where time is out of time and beauty reigns unchallenged and untouched.

These five books will fully immerse you in the most authentic atmospheres of Salento and then experience them starting from Tenuta Rocci Cerasoli, from where you can easily reach all the coolest destinations as well as those more hushed but narrated in the literary works we have recommended. Here, in the heart of Salento, you can enjoy an unforgettable stay, wrapped in nature and surrounded by the unique wonders of the Heel of Italy.

We are waiting for you for a summer of discovery and relaxation.