Lecce's limestone quarries yielded the pale tufo that Zimbalo carved into roses and the same stone that lines the city's wood-fired ovens, baking rustico leccese at 260 degrees since the sixteenth century. The pasticciotto—a custard tart encased in shortcrust—was invented here in 1745 by Andrea Ascalone, a Santa Croce parish baker who kneaded lard into flour and filled the shells with crema pasticcera still served warm each morning in the city's caffè. Lecce's edible identity is inseparable from its baroque architecture: both are expressions of Salento's agricultural surplus, the wheat and wine wealth that funded Gabriele Riccardi's facades and the olive presses that still extract gold from Cellina trees planted under Spanish rule. Today the historic center operates as an open-air tasting route. Via Palmieri's alimentari stock burrata di Andria within hours of curdling; the cheese arrives in waxed paper, its stracciatella heart pooling when sliced. Piazza Sant'Oronzo's morning market sells friselle—twice-baked durum rounds—that vendors soak in tomato water and dress with wild oregano from the Murge plateau. Wine bars along Via Umberto pour Primitivo di Manduria and Negroamaro from the Salice Salentino DOC, both varietals adapted to the limestone soils that drain summer rains and concentrate tannins. The same tufo that built the Basilica di Santa Croce filters the aquifer beneath the city, lending Lecce's hydration a mineral clarity that bakers claim improves their dough. A Lecce food and wine tour threads these elements—architecture, agriculture, artisanship—into a single walk. Participants move from the pasticciotteria to the norcineria, from the rosticceria's panzerotti to a courtyard pasta workshop where nonnas roll orecchiette by thumb. The itinerary is not curated for novelty but for continuity: each stop demonstrates techniques unchanged since the eighteenth century, when Lecce's trade guilds codified recipes in notarial ledgers. The city's gastronomic code is still legible in its street food, its wine lists, its bakery queues at dawn.