Local people & culture in Puglia, Italy travel guide, Puglia food tour, Puglia tourist attractions, Puglia Italy tourism & vacations, Italy travel vlog
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There are some very good reasons why everyone seems to be going to Puglia in southern Italy right now. The remote heel of Italy's boot dramatically combines fairytale cottages, Baroque architecture and some of the best sandy beaches in mainland Italy. Italian families head for the coast every year in July and August. But handsome Baroque towns such as Martina Franca and the engaging Lecce see only a handful of visitors each day. And if you decide to explore some of Puglia's more remote Basilian chapels or prehistoric dolmens, you will be gloriously alone. But the most recent attraction of the region is the food scene - a combination of top-quality local produce and authentic Italian home cooking.

THE GARGANO PENINSULA
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The region of Puglia extends a good way up the Achilles' tendon of Italy to a wild spur, the Gargano peninsula, whose northern shore is on the same latitude as Rome. This area is, in fact, a lost chip of Yugoslavia, left behind when two geological plates separated to form the Adriatic. The Gargano is a world apart: a place of dark, ancient forests, caves, shrines, coastal watchtowers and intricate fishing villages. The creation of the Parco Nazionale del Gargano in 1991 attracts some tourists, but not many. BARI Explore the labyrinthine old town and the Basilica di San Nicola.

MOLFETTA, TRANI AND BARLETTA
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Molfetta is the first of a trio of port towns north of Bari whose present-day sprawl radiates from a tight, walled medieval centre. Trani, just up the coast, is dominated by a glorious, bleached-out Romanesque cathedral. In Barletta, the most northerly of the three, a third-century bronze colossus stares into space with a stolid, vacant expression.

MARTINA FRANCA
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See the frescoes in the Palazzo Ducale and the baroque Chiesa di San Martino.

LOCOROTONDO
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This circular, whitewashed town has views over the trulli-peppered Valle d'Itria, and excellent wines.

LA MURGIA
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A limestone plateau scored by deep ravines (gravine) and sudden sinkholes (pule). Olives and vines on the lower slopes give way to scrubby, rock-strewn grazing land. Remote and aloof, Alta Murgia is the perfect setting for the castle of an enlightened philosopher-king.

CASTEL DEL MONTE
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Under Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, between 1220 and 1250, the region became a crossroads between the Roman Catholic Byzantine and Arab worlds. The emperor himself was a poet, a philosopher, and the author of a treatise on falconry. During his reign, castles were built, or repaired, all over southern Italy to defend the Kingdom of Sicily from its many enemies. But Castel del Monte, the most memorable and iconic, was not built to defend anything. Nobody ever lived here and there is no town or strategic crossroads nearby.

BASSA MURGIA AND THE VALLE D'ITRIA
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The Trulli are strange, cylindrical peasant houses with beehive roofs which are still in use today. The Valle D'Itria, between the towns of Putignano and Martina Franca, is the best place for trullo-hunting. If there is no evidence of trulli older than the 16th century, this may be because they are easier to rebuild than to restore. Like the dry-stone wall, the fanciful trullo served an eminently practical function: it was a way of using up all the stones that peasants cleared from their difficult, rocky fields. It was easily made and easily knocked down again.

ALBEROBELLO
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Only here have trulli strayed from country to town. In the quartieri known as Monti and Aia Piccola there are whole streets of them, rising in neat terraces. The fabric of the trulli is now protected by UNESCO.

LECCE
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Lecce has been called the 'Florence of the baroque', more than 40 churches and at least as many noble palazzi were built or renovated here between the middle of the 17th century and the end of the 18th to create one of the most unified urban landscapes in Italy. It is a relaxed place; the locals sit outside bars such as Pasticceria Alvino in piazza Sant'Oronzo, sipping iced coffee with almond syrup (latte di mandorla, an eminently southern soft drink), or they window-shop along corso Vittorio Emanuele.

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