Arthur Symons wrote: “Cities are like peoples: they have their own soul and personality. I suppose that the spirit of a city can be revealed just to people who love or hate it intensively.
I have been in several cities did not touch me at all, maybe because of something happened during the way even though, to tell the truth, they did not say anything to me…It would have been impossible to write about: I would find nothing to tell. But some towns…how much I really loved them! […] It is as if all of those towns had transmitted something about their soul, like peoples I have loved and hated along my journey around the world.” Arthur Symons.

When they come for the first time to Salento peninsula – often motivated by anything but literary interests – many English travellers did not imagine they would bind on this land as deeply as to make them feel a part of it but also of its history.

A valid example was Martin Shaw Briggs who, born in Otley in the Yorkshire, is one of the most famous English travellers-writers in Salento. In his work, In the heel of Italy; a study of an unknown city published in 1910, he wrote: “City has a noble history and a really significance currently in Italy, even though it owns invaluable vestiges of a far-off past dating back to dark age of the primitive history”.

The title of his book, In the heel of Italy; a study of an unknown city, the city is unknown because English people did not still know it in that period.
It was in April 1907 that Briggs, who was in Salento for the first time to study monuments and palaces of the city for the Architectural Review, was so deeply struck by architectural beauties he decided to come back again two years later as a traveller.
He met some important characters of Salento, such as the duke Sigismondo Castromediano, Antonio Galateo, and he decided to tell both history of Lecce and the Martyrs of Otranto and, in a very soft style, history of some of the small villages he visited along the way from Lecce, the city built with the golden stone of Terra d’Otranto, to Santa Maria di Leuca.
Briggs is one of these travellers-writers who tells about Salento as if he had known everything of this land for ever.
Come and visit this land, the traveller. […] Everywhere he goes, he will find out courtesy of this people and realize he will have many debts of kindness. When he has to go away, either he leaves when dawn dissipates the fog among palm trees and gardens or sunset illuminates the bright cupola of the Dome with its rays, he will feel an eternal attachment for the beautiful Lecce.