Reid's Italy Adventures: Sweet, Sweet Heaven

Lecce is one of the loveliest, liveliest towns in Southern Italy, but some of its best secrets hide in the unlikeliest of places

I was walking up the street in Lecce near Santa Croce church when someone across at the edge of my peripheral vision started calling out to me in English "Hey! Hello! Excuse me, hello!"

As usual — as with the hotel touts at train stations, the man at the postcard stand today, and the guy playing his guitar (badly) yesterday in a doorway — when strangers on the street in Italy start talking to me in "American," I ignore them completely. Not to be rude, but because 9.99 times out of ten they want to sell me something I don't want or need, and they're out to fleece me to boot.

So I kept walking ahead. Then the voice said "Eh, uhm... Frommer's! Frommer's, hello!"

Wait a minute. This guy knows who I am.

I turned and it was a face I sort of kind of vaguely recognized. He shook my hand and said (In Italian from here on in) "It's me Andrea, sorry your name slipped my mind for a minute there, but it's Reid, right?" He introduced me to his friend, we smiled, and he commented/asked "So, still touring around for work, yes?" yes, I am. "Did you ever get the chance to go to the beach?" I shake my head. "You work all the time, yes?" Unfortunately, yes.

I still haven't the foggiest who this guy is. Someone I've met in the past several days — not here in Lecce, but somewhere in Apulia — but I can't place him at all. He asks where I'm headed and I said to lunch, that-a-way. His car's that-a-way, let's walk together. So we chat. He asked if I know of the Suore (sisters). What Suore? He grins. "Follow me."

We diverge up a side street and cut through two nameless piazze where clearly once stood buildings but where now people just park. One side of the second piazza is a long, windowless wall interrupted only by a solid double metal door painted green with a "No Parking" sign yellowing on it. He walks up to the door and presses a buzzer. He grins at me. After a few moments, a feathery old woman's voice crackles over the intercom, "Si?"

My friend (whoever he is) asks in extremely polite terms for something from the feathery old woman's voice, and it replies "Si, certo. Un attimo soltanto." (Yes, of course. Just a minute.)

We started chatting again, waiting up against this green double door. After about five minutes, the door cracks open and a delicate, liver-spotted hand reaches out, proffering a flat package wrapped in white paper and secured with a thin green ribbon like a present. The mysterious Andrea hands the wrinkled hand about 12,000L ($6) and I peek around to see a kindly old nun in her habit and wimple smiling at us from the dark. She's the lucky nun, in my opinion, the only one within this cloistered order who's allowed to communicate with the outside world.

We thanked her profusely and walked back through the two nameless piazze to get out of the sun and untied to green ribbon to open one end of the package. Out slid a cardboard tray piled with florettes of marzipan, sugary almond paste shaped into candies, with a dollop of pear marmalade hiding in the center. Without trying to make a joke on the calling of the good Sisters of San Giovanni, their marzipans are quite heavenly.

Now that is the sort of thing I want to put into guidebooks.