It is little wonder that Lecce is establishing itself as a must-see city on tourists' Italian bucket lists. Nicknamed the ‘Florence of the South’, the dazzling Baroque jewel of a city in the south of Puglia – the Italian region that forms the heel of Italy's boot – brims with elegant palazzi, pristine parks and ornate church façades carved from white, eminently sculptable ‘Lecce stone’. The city is especially atmospheric at night, when elegant piazzas thrum with the sound of diners and coffee drinkers.

For one long weekend in September, the city also reverberated with a new sound. The inaugural edition of Piano City Lecce featured 33 main artists and 16 students, who delivered tens of free concerts spanning three genres – classical, jazz and contemporary – over the course of a three-day music marathon. Some of the concerts took place in private homes; others in a Roman amphitheatre, a nature reserve and even a moving bus. All were well attended, as piano mania evidently took hold of the city.

Repertoire was often carefully chosen to match the venue. In the Basilica di Santa Croce – Lecce's most important landmark, famed for its breathtakingly lavish exterior overflowing with carvings of animals, vegetables and grotesque figures – pianist Cecilia Facchini played Liszt's Three Petrarch Sonnets, the music's cascading tresses seeming to intertwine with those crowning the rows of columns in the nave. In ‘Le Cesine’ nature reserve, pianist and composer Cesare Picco emerged from among the trees, rattling them with a sturdy branch as he approached the piano. He then delivered his own contemplative pieces as an audience lying on the ground gazed up at the stars and rustling trees.

There were fewer concerts than in previous editions: Piano City Milano delivered more than 200 performances last May. But when it came to the selection of the venues, quality over quantity prevailed. Events included a performance at a cavalry training school, where horsebound soldiers circled a park behind the pianists, and a silent concert in Lecce's Castle of Charles V, during which audience members wearing headphones freely roamed the courtyard. At pianist Andrés Barrios’ contemporary concert, the city's towering, fascist-era water reservoir – which is nicknamed ‘The Spaceship’ but looks more like a modern take on a medieval tower – formed an imposing backdrop. In the night-time concert on a moving bus, Toni Tarantino hammered out Italian TV theme tunes as the music-lovers who were crammed on board passionately sang along.

Established in Berlin in 2012, the Piano City model has now been reproduced in dozens of cities, including New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Madrid. The simple format involves scheduling a diverse series of concerts in the city's streets, squares and landmarks. Key aims include cultivating new audiences and bringing visitors and locals into contact with forgotten or little-known locations of their city. The inaugural Lecce edition showed just how effectively the Piano City model does both.

Andreas Kern: ‘Each edition should feel like an individual product of the city that creates it’

The brains behind the inaugural initiative in Lecce was Alessandro Polito, the founder of Icon Radio – a Pugliese station that is known for its eclectic yet seamless music playlists. He assembled an expert committee led by Giacomo Fronzi, a prominent radio personality on Italy's Rai Radio 3 classical music channel and a philosophy professor at Lecce's Salento University, to select the acts. In addition to Piano City's standard aims, the team was set on reviving the once rich music traditions of Lecce – a city that produced operatic tenor Tito Schipa and boasts a rich network of music education institutions – partly by giving performance opportunities to emerging talent. ‘We wanted to put music at the centre of life in Lecce for one special weekend, and a vast and diverse range of music rather than a niche one,’ Fronzi told me. ‘Our local musical culture has become weaker over the last decade; we thought Piano City would be the perfect way to rejuvenate it.’

The team's efforts drew piano luminaries, including the pianist Andreas Kern, inventor of the Piano City model, who was seemingly omnipresent in Lecce as he sought to cram in as many concerts as possible. Prior to 2012, Kern had long dreamed of filling Berlin with the sounds of keyboards. ‘The first image I had was of people opening their windows and filling the streets with music by playing their pianos or recordings, but I soon realised this was not very practical,’ he explained. Kern therefore decided to schedule a citywide series of concerts instead, including a home concert from pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, who Kern knew because they lived on the same street.

Unexpectedly, other cities began asking to adopt the Piano City model. Each one has had its own individual character. ‘In Naples, you had a really cool urban, grungy atmosphere, with maybe a few people sitting on the floor of a little piano shop listening to a concert. That would never happen in Lecce, which has a much classier air. Each edition should feel like an individual product of the city that creates it,’ Kern says. ‘This is not like TEDx, where the same design is rolled out all over the world.’

Cesare Picco performs at Le Cesine nature reserve © DANIELE CORICCIATI

Kern, who assists other cities on developing their own editions, says that he is ‘quite relaxed’ about other places using the Piano City brand. Many cities that initially approach Kern to express interest in launching the event, however, soon disappear off the radar once they realise the amount of work involved. ‘Piano City is not possible with something like 20 concerts. Many more concerts are required, because this is about making cities shake with music – and that takes a lot of work.

Piano City works, Kern says, when a city assembles a passionate team of locals who understand local tastes, have good connections and are determined to make the initiative work. The quality and vision of Lecce's team is what made the event such a success. ‘This is not like organising Fête de la Musique. You need a team and you need people that plan things carefully,’ Kern says. ‘I had the feeling from the beginning that they were trying to get the best outcome. Alessandro went along to other piano cities; he was doing research.’

Lecce provided some ‘truly special’ moments over the three days, Kern says, with highlights including the concert in the nature reserve, where trees swayed in the night breeze as if dancing to the music, and some of the more intimate home concerts. If done right, though, Piano City is usually bound to work. ‘I really think the piano is the best kind of instrument for this kind of initiative,’ Kern says. ‘Unlike with the violin, if you have a young person playing Für Elise it could already be quite nice. That's why the piano is so easy to enjoy. You just press the key and the sound is there.’

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