Slow Salento
Let’s try to explain Salento, and to try, we need to take into consideration its nature as a peninsula – tending towards a cultural island – of a territory that not only reaches the extreme south-eastern extension of Italy. A people proud of itself but which in its once peasant component still retains in dialectal expressions, in prejudicial assumptions, a natural habit of considering itself the loser and preyed on power relations. With the limited and partial exception of the capital, the people of Salento have long been used to being on the margins, ignored by the rest of the country – the South of the South.