Cammino del Salento (Via del Mare) - 23-26 October 2025

Located at the (almost) southernmost tip of Italy's "heel", Santa Maria di Leuca is one of those few places where towns, roads, and even land finsihes to give way to the sea. This sort of places have always fascinated me as, they force you to stop and go back.

Sometimes I feel like our societies are moving at a vertiginous speed: progress is sold as "inevitable" and we invent and implement new "stuff" everyday, under the assumption that "if we can, we should do".

In a certain sense we owe much of our incredible living standards to this imperative, but lately I am reflecting more and more on the fact that by going so fast, it becomes impossible for us to fully understand the consequences of what we are doing.

In this scenario slowing down becomes essential and I think that's part of the reason why I love so much long-distance hiking: it allows me to slow down and understand which are the things that I truly value and appreciate.

So yeah, as soon as I learnt that there was a trail leading to Santa Maria di Leuca, I knew I had to go. I planned it two times in the past two years but some last-minute inconvinience came up both times and I couldn't leave.

At the beginning of October 2025 I tried again: I asked an old friend and a new one and they said yes. We left on October 23rd and we made it in 4 days.

To do it in this season it was magical: not only the temperature was perfect (we bathed twice) but the trail and the cities we went to were empty (admittedly, it was a bit sad) so we got to expierence these beautiful places without the burden of overtourism.