Grotta della Poesia: the pool you are not allowed to swim in

What the Grotta della Poesia actually is

It is a karst cavity whose roof fell in. The sea reaches it through a passage in the rock, so the pool refills and drains with the Adriatic while sitting a few metres inland, ringed by a wall of pale limestone. The pool is a piece of coast that collapsed, not a cove, which is why the water reads turquoise against white stone in every photograph taken here, and why the place looks engineered when it is not.

There are two caves, not one, and the famous one is the less important. The pool everybody photographs is the Poesia Grande. About sixty metres away sits the Poesia Piccola, smaller, harder to see into, and the reason archaeologists care about this coast at all.

The name is usually explained with a story about a princess who bathed here and drew poets to the spot. It is a good story and there is no evidence for it. The prosaic explanation, that the name comes from posìa, medieval Greek for drinking, after the fresh spring water that gathered in the cave, is duller and more likely.

You cannot swim in it, and the site selling you the ticket does not say so

Swimming and diving in the Grotta della Poesia are not allowed, and this is not a new rule brought in with the 2026 ticket. It rests on an ordinance of the Capitaneria di Porto, number 77 of 2014, and on a mayoral ordinance issued by the Comune di Melendugno in 2019.

The limestone cliff is worked constantly by sea, wind and weather, and people were getting down to the water along routes nobody had checked. On top of that sits the archaeology, which is soft, carved and directly above the waterline.

The awkward part is that the operator's own website never mentions any of it. We read archeoroca.it again on 13 September 2026, in Italian and in English: its pages never say that swimming is prohibited; the conditions of sale linked from the ticket page only ban bringing in beach gear.

So the site that sells you the ticket tells you the opening hours and the price, and leaves you to discover on arrival that the thing you came to do is off the table. People still turn up in swimming costumes. Do not be one of them, and if you want a swim, Torre dell'Orso is a couple of kilometres down the coast.

What you pay, and what the €5 actually buys

Since 18 July 2026 the archaeological area of Roca Vecchia, the Grotte included, has been ticketed. It is run under a public-private partnership called ArcheoRoca, between the Comune di Melendugno and the cooperative ArtWork, signed for fifteen years with renewal possible. These are the operator's own prices, read on 13 September 2026 and again in October 2026.

The guided visit and the virtual reality are not included in the €5. Several reports of the launch implied they were, and they are a separate €10 ticket. Residents of Melendugno go free, and the operator lists reduced rates for families and groups without publishing them, so ask at the desk rather than online.

There are two ticket offices, one at the Castello area and one at the Grotte Poesia area, and tickets are also sold on the operator's site. A visiting app called POPGuide covers the route if you would rather not pay for the guide.

When to go

Within the day, go early. The pool faces the sky rather than a horizon, so it takes direct sun to turn the water the colour you came for, and by the middle of a July afternoon you are sharing a narrow rim with everybody else who read the same article.

The six hundred square metres that make it more than a photograph

The Poesia Piccola was a sanctuary, and it holds one of the largest collections of Messapian inscriptions known. It was brought to scholarly attention in 1983 by Cosimo Pagliara, an archaeologist at the University of Lecce, now the University of Salento, and what he found was not a handful of scratches: over six hundred square metres of carved wall, layered with prehistoric figures and with texts in Messapian, Greek and Latin.

The inscriptions are votive. They name the god Taotor, worshipped here across centuries by people who came to the cave to leave a mark and ask for something.

The Messapian ones begin in the second half of the fourth century BC and run into the third, the Latin ones follow from the late third century, and the writing stops in the second, when Roca was abandoned. Messapian is known almost only from inscriptions, a few hundred of them across southern Puglia, and this cave holds one of the largest groups.

The numbers are quoted carelessly. The operator says the cave holds "hundreds" of carvings; press coverage of the ticket said over three thousand. No source we could check supports a count in the thousands, and the figure everyone does agree on is the surface, those six hundred square metres.

Roca Vecchia, the town the caves belong to

The Grotte are one end of a site that has been occupied, on and off, for more than three thousand years, and the ticket covers the whole of it.

A fortified settlement went up on this promontory in the seventeenth century BC, and it was not a backwater: its people traded with the Aegean, Minoan and Mycenaean worlds. Around 1400 BC the town was besieged and destroyed, and the destruction layer is still readable in the ground. Life went on after it: the monumental building the archaeologists call the capanna tempio, the temple hut, dates from the eleventh century BC.

Roca came back in the Messapian period, between the fourth and third centuries BC, this time inside a wall circuit about 1,400 metres long, with streets, houses, wells and a necropolis. It was refounded a third time in the late Middle Ages by Gualtieri VI di Brienne, count of Lecce, as a walled town with a castle, a market and two churches, one Latin and one Greek, which tells you what kind of place this coast was.

One thing you will not see: the gold sun discs from the temple hut are on loan to the exhibition Troia e Roma at the Colosseum until 18 October 2026. The plan is a museum in the former summer seminary building, and it is not open yet.

Getting there, and where to leave the car

The site sits on the Strada Provinciale 366, the Litoranea Salentina, at Roca Vecchia in the comune of Melendugno. From Lecce it is about 28 km and half an hour: take the SP1 towards Melendugno, then follow the brown signs from the coast road.

There is no train to Roca Vecchia. In summer two bus services run along this stretch: the Comune’s MareinBus, whose RocaExpress line stops at Roca, and the Provincia’s SalentoinBus from Lecce, which in 2026 ran from 13 June to 13 September.

Both are built around the beaches rather than the archaeology, so a car is the honest answer for most people. Parking is at Roca Vecchia and it fills from mid-morning in August; our notes on Puglia in August cover what that month does to this coast generally.

If you are staying in Lecce, this pairs naturally with the beaches immediately north and south of it, and it is one of the shorter runs on our list of day trips from Lecce.

What to do with the rest of the day

The site itself takes an hour to ninety minutes, more with the guided ticket, and then the day is yours. Since the swimming happens elsewhere, plan for it.

Torre dell'Orso is the obvious pairing, a sand bay with the Due Sorelle stacks a couple of kilometres down the coast, and it is where most people who came here to swim end up. San Foca, a little further north, is rockier. Further south, Otranto is around half an hour and gives you a walled town, a cathedral floor mosaic and lunch.

Going the other way, the whole Melendugno coast is low limestone and clear water, and we rate several of these stretches in our guide to the best beaches in Puglia. Whatever you pick, do the archaeology first, while the light is still low and the rim is still empty.

Grotta della Poesia: FAQ