A travel guide to Apulia

Visiting Apulia (Puglia), Italy

Puglia tourism information:
www.viaggiareinpuglia.it

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Top destinations in Apulia
• Alberobello - The capital village of the Valle d'Itria, a fairytale land of cylindrical white houses with conical roofs.
• Lecce - The Florence of the baroque, a university town with fantastical architecture and a strong crafts tradition.
• Bari - The main city of Apulia has whitewashed streets and the tomb of Santa Claus himself.
• The Gargano Peninsula - The spur on the heel of Italy's boot is strung with sunny beaches, fishing villages, prehistoric artifacts, and the home of Italy's most popular modern saint.
• Ostuni - "The White City" is a whitewashed spiral of houses perched atop a hilltop near the sea.
• Brindisi - Plenty of interest to distract you as you wait for that ferry to Greece.

The heel of Italy's boot, peninsular Puglia (pool-yah) is the land of sunflowers and Santa Claus, olive oil and orecchiette pasta, Romanesque churches and whitewashed villages.

It's a cultural mélange unequaled in Italy, forming one of the country's most underrated, underexplored, and undiscovered regions.

Nowhere else in Italy is there a more precise balance of east and west, Greek and Roman, Byzantine and Lombard, Arab and Norman. Apulia wears its heritage on its sleeve—or rather in its streets, an intricate urban fabric woven from diverse architectural forms.

But don't expect to see the usual Italian versions of Gothic, Romanesque, or baroque. There must be something in the pristine waters and clear air of Le Puglia that inspires flights of fancy and bursts of genius in any craftsman, artist, or architect.

French, Spanish, and Italian, prehistoric, baroque, and postmodern—Apulia has taken in all influences and channeled them into some of Italy's most incredible syncretic styles.

These range from the prehistoric statue-steles of Manfredonia to Frederick II's weird octagonal Norman Castel del Monte near Bari, from the the whitewashed blind alleys of Saracenic street plans to the idiosyncratic baroque style of Lecce, and from towering Romanesque-Gothic cathedrals in the northern provinces to the curious, pointy trulli houses of Alberobello and the Itria Valley.

Reid's favorite bits of Apulia
• Castel del Monte - Weird, octagonal Norman-era castle sprouting from olive groves.
• Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, Galatina - Slathered in Technicolor medieval frescoes the style of Giotto.
• Rent a trullo in Alberobello - Rather than just snap pictures of Italy's oddest architecture, why not live in one for a spell?
• Castello Svevo-Aragonese, Manfredonia - Prehistoric statue-steles at a conveniently beach-adjacent castle-museum.
• The secret road of the Valle d'Itria - Travel back in town along a dirt road through trulli country.
• Grottaglie - One of Italy's unsung ceramics capitals.
• Cathedral of Trani - Thousand-year-old cathedral perched by the sea.
• Papier-mâché in Lecce.
• Museo Archeologico Nazionale Jatta, Ruvo di Puglia - Tiny but utterly amazing collection of Greek-era vases; also: free.
• Santa Croce, Lecce - A baroque riot of animistic symbolism and statuary.The craft industry thrives here, from the papier-mâché statuettes of Lecce fashion to the painted ceramics of Grottaglie.

Apulia is one of Italy's lushest breadbaskets, producing 54% of its olive oil, 19% of its grain, and an incredible 80% of Europe's pasta.

You'll discover dozens of hand-rolled pasta shapes, loaves of bread almost two feet across in Monte Sant'Angelo, delicious mussels in Taranto, and some incredibly full, earthy, but little-known red wines like Salice Salentino, Primitivo, and Locorotondo.

With 784km (470 miles) of grotto- and beach-studded coastline, whitewashed cities, incredible seafood, archaeological museums, glittering caverns, and medieval castles, Apulia is a unique landscape just waiting for the outside world to discover it.

Pugliese cuisine

Apulia's trinity of homemade pasta shapes are orecchiette ("little ears" shaped like tiny, thick Frisbees), cavatelli (orecchiette rolled into a short tube),and troccoli (fat, square spaghetti). Any pasta served with cima di rape comes with boiled turnip greens.

After "little ears," the quintessential Pugliese dish is purè di fave con cicoria (broad beans pureed and sided or mixed with boiled chicory).

Other popular dishes include spaghetti ricci di mare (with sea urchin), polpette al sugo (meatballs in tomato sauce), and braciola or involtino (veal rolled up and stewed for hours in tomato sauce).

Fresh ewe's milk ricotta is often salt-cured to form a hard, gratable variety called ricotta dura, ricotta forte, or cacioricotta—when invoked in a pasta sauce (sometimes called mantecati) the hard ricotta is grated over a tomato purée.

Pugliese wine

Hearty Apulian wine should be more famous than it is. The ancient poet Horace sung its praises, and the region is still Italy's most prolific, churning out 17% of the national total. For centuries, it was just the local grapes that interested the world's wine industries—Turin imported them to make Vermouth, and France's dirty little secret used to be that they snuck boatloads of Apulian grapes into their presses during bad harvest years at home.

But Apulian wine is beginning to trade on its own merits. Though some vines are left to grow into traditional bush-like alborelli, most vines are forced into a sharp bend after a foot or two, forming rows of gnarled, woody question marks. The dusty, deep purple globes of their grapes dangle close to the ground, soaking up a raw earthiness that gives even young Apulian reds amazing structure and body—perfect for the strong flavors of Apulia's hearty peasant cooking.

This as a boom time for the Apulian wine industry. Oenological giants like the Antinori empire are snapping up local real estate—and with prime Apulian land going for 1/6 the price in Tuscany, the wines themselves can be astoundingly cheap. Even bottles of Big Reds ring in at under $15, including the local Primitivo, named for an ancient local grape that, oddly enough, was recently proven to be DNA-identical to California Zinfandel, and the blood-black Salice Salentino, made from Negro Amaro grapes that grow in the region around Lecce, in Apulia's Deep South.

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This material was last updated January 2009. All information was accurate at the time.

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