Never have handicrafts been so «desired» as pottery now is. Just holding a florally decorated «trozzella» (Messapian vase) is enough to make you understand how much clay has been sedimented in the hearts and hands of this area. Terracotta takes on hundreds of forms on the pottery wheel; the ones to collect are those which magically imprison the wind within a whistle.
By dint of cutting in swamps and bogs pursued by horse-flies and tormented by mosquitoes, he became yellow like the reeds of the Ugento marshes. Land drainage and quinine finally conquered fever but the basket maker continued to model wicker and reeds and to reweave wefts of olive twigs. Some still-warm ricotta cheese baskets look like immaculate trulli (conical huts) of trembling lime.
They called him «Mesciu Pietru de li Cristi» (Master Peter of the Christs) and he crucified many Christs with metal wire. But also puppets, and more often saints. He had a workshop in Baroque Lecce, where they boiled paper, made flour glue, copper sulphate and bright rags. A barber, they said, lost in art. He made strange tools red-hot, to model the statues, and the lines of puppets smelled of straw and hemp. How many beards for the sake of just one nativity scene and a fallen Figaro (barber)!       
They  stayed there for hours, balancing on boards, chiselling strangely shaped blocks. Dragons, mermaids, telamons (statues which support buildings), caryatids (hags), sea horses, lions and eagles… Even gods transformed themselves into stone to avoid being sculpted by those hands. They chiselled, cut and polished all day long, like jewellers achieving a perfect mechanism. When they went home in the evening like glow-worms they left a trail of gold dust behind them.