Lecce makes an impression before you’ve eaten anything. The city is carved from golden limestone that catches the light at dusk in a way that makes you understand immediately why they called it the Florence of the South. The Baroque facades are so dense with ornament — cherubs and saints and coiling stone foliage — that you stop on the pavement and stare. Puglia is one of Italy’s most rewarding slow-travel destinations — and Lecce is where the experience runs deepest.
But then Silvestro Silvestori takes you to the market, and you understand that the stone is only half the story.
The Awaiting Table Cookery School has been in the heart of Lecce for three decades. The New York Times has called Silvestro “a pioneer of teaching food and wine in Puglia,” and the description is exact — not just for the cooking techniques he teaches, but for something harder to convey in a phrase: a whole philosophy of how a place eats, passed on to people who have come from the other side of the world to learn it.
The morning market course begins before nine. Silvestro walks his students through the stalls of the local market where the vendors know him by name — past the crates of fave beans (pale green in spring, dried to a creamy yellow by summer), past the wild greens gathered from the roadsides and fields outside the city, past the fish laid out in the particular Salento style that has nothing to do with the fish markets of the north. He explains not just what everything is but why it appears: the soil conditions that produce Puglia’s extraordinary olive oil, the Arab and Greek and Norman layers in the food culture that have accumulated over two thousand years, the reason the bread is baked in a particular shape.
The lesson, in other words, is not the recipe. The recipe is the last part.
“We eat like this because of where we are,” is how Silvestro puts it. The how and why of a cuisine — not the finished dish but the reasons behind every choice — is what students leave Lecce understanding, often more deeply than they expected to.
The school sits in a restored palazzo in the centro storico. Cooking happens in the kitchen and at the table in the manner of a Pugliese family — the difference between a cooking demonstration and the real thing being precisely the difference between watching someone else’s meal and making your own. Students cut the pasta, fold the pastry, taste the oil with the attention Silvestro brings to it as a certified olive oil sommelier, and then sit down to eat what they have made, with wine chosen from the producers of the Salento peninsula.
For Italian-Americans whose family connections to the mezzogiorno were broken a century ago by emigration, the experience often arrives as something more than a cooking lesson. Puglia — the heel of the boot, the land their great-grandparents left behind — fed half the Italian-American community in the United States. The surnames, the dialect words that survived in family kitchens, the way certain dishes were always made: many of these came from the deep south. If you want to trace where your family’s food traditions began, the Italian surname finder at italian.synpromedia.com is a place to start. To come back and cook it in the city where it started can feel, for some students, like completing a sentence that was interrupted.
Sunday evenings at The Awaiting Table are for wine. Silvestro, who holds the AIS sommelier qualification as well as the FIS certification in extra virgin olive oil, leads a structured tasting of the extraordinary wines being produced in Puglia — Primitivo, Negroamaro, Fiano — with the kind of contextual knowledge that turns tasting into understanding. The wines of the Salento peninsula carry centuries of sun and story that no single tasting can exhaust.
Classes run throughout the year. The short courses — a morning at the market and a long lunch, an introduction to the whole Puglia food tradition, a Sunday evening wine class — suit people with limited time. The full residential course, which runs over several days, gives students the slower version: the neighbourhood, the producers, the olive groves, the market at the start of every day.
If you can trace your family to the south of Italy, there is a class in Lecce waiting for you.
Bookings at awaitingtable.com. The calendar fills early.
Secure Your Dream Italian Experience Before It’s Gone!
Planning a trip to Italy? Don’t let sold-out tours or overcrowded attractions spoil your adventure. Unmissable experiences like exploring the Colosseum, gliding through Venice on a gondola, or marvelling at the Sistine Chapel often book up fast—especially during peak travel seasons.
Booking in advance guarantees your place and ensures you can fully immerse yourself in the rich culture and breathtaking scenery without stress or disappointment. You’ll also free up time to explore Italy's hidden gems and savour those authentic moments that make your trip truly special.
Make the most of your journey—start planning today and secure those must-do experiences before they’re gone!