Southern Italy Road Trip: Exploring the Puglia Region
Italy is like my second home. As the daughter of an Italian mother and an Italo-American father, I spent many of my childhood summers visiting family in the Marche region of Central Italy. When I was old enough to appreciate traveling, my parents began taking me on road trips through Tuscany, Umbria and Abruzzo. By the time I graduated high school, I’d already been to Italy nearly a dozen times and seen the country from top to bottom.
But—save for a short road trip when I was six years old—I’d spent very little time exploring the heel of Italy’s boot.
The heel, known as Puglia (or Apulia), often doesn’t make it onto the itinerary of first-time travelers to Italy. Nor does it make it onto the itineraries of people visiting for the second time. Nor the third. Puglia lacks big name attractions like Florence, Venice or Rome. As a result, the underrated region in Southern Italy is not a typical Italy bucket list destination.
Yet not only is Puglia one of the least visited regions in Italy, it is also one of its most beautiful. So when my mom decided to spend the summer teaching in Lecce, my family jumped on the opportunity to revisit an underrated and under-explored corner of the country.
MUST SEE ATTRACTIONS IN PUGLIA ITALY
At the end of her summer of teaching, I embarked on a road trip through Puglia with my parents and my boyfriend, Dan. Along the way, we saw many of Puglia’s most beautiful attractions.
Though Puglia doesn’t contain any of Italy’s most crowded must-see sights, Italy’s heel has a number of noteworthy places to visit —including beaches, castles, and villages lost in time.
Thanks to its diverse and varied attractions , Puglia is one of the best road trip destinations in Europe.
LECCE: ITALY’S BAROQUE GEM
The gem of Puglia, Lecce may very well be one of Italy’s most underrated cities. A vibrant city with a decorative flair, Lecce is the perfect base for exploring the far south of Italy’s heel.
Lecce is a mid-sized city known for delicate baroque architecture . Bequeathed with expressive designs and intricate carvings, Lecce’s architecture is so distinct that it has acquired its own moniker, barocco Leccese (Lecce baroque).
I’ve never been particularly drawn to baroque architecture. It has always seemed gaudy and heavy. But Lecce’s style of baroque is different. In Lecce, the uniform buildings give the city a cohesive appeal and its decorative baroque finishes remind me of frosting decorations on a wedding cake.
We spent two days relishing the pretty city of Lecce. During the day, we escaped the August heat and headed for beaches along the nearby Adriatic and Ionian Seas. At night, we strolled around the pleasant college town and soaked in its jovial atmosphere.
BEACH DAY TRIPS FROM LECCE
Lecce is the perfect base for day trips in the Puglia region. Both the Adriatic and Ionian Seas are within easy access of the city.
Salento, a geographic area that encompasses the tip of southern Puglia, claims many of the most beautiful beaches in Italy. While this is a well-known fact among Italian tourists, the regions beaches fly under-the-radar among tourists from abroad.
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PORTO CESAREO BEACH
For beach-lovers, the turquoise waters of Porto Cesareo offer respite from the hot summers in Southern Italy. Porto Cesareo lies in a little cove, flanked by dunes and typical mediterranean wild scrub. The shallow waters of the beach are some of the cleanest and clearest I’ve seen in Italy. Swimming at Porto Cesareo Beach is like lounging in a bathtub.
When I visited in the heat of summer, Porto Cesareo Beach was crowded. However, one would be hard-pressed to find such a beautiful stretch of sand with fewer people during Italy’s hottest months.
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SANTA MARIA DI LEUCA: PUGLIA’S SOUTHERNMOST CITY
The tiny town of Santa Maria di Leuca sits on the southernmost tip of the Salento, peninsula where the waters of the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet. The town–itself a worthwhile stop on an itinerary to the Puglia Region–sits just a stone’s throw from azure swimming holes and dramatic cliffside scenery.
After a few hours of discovering various swimming holes in Santa Maria di Leuca, we headed back to Lecce–stopping occasionally to admire crumbling castle towers and coastal monoliths that dot the countryside of Italy’s underrated and exceptionally beautiful Puglia region.
OSTUNI
After a few days of enjoying Lecce’s pretty sights and cooling off in the pristine water near Porto Cesareo and Leuca, we began our Puglia road trip. Along the way, we stopped at some of the most beautiful places in Puglia.
The first stop on our journey from Lecce to Fabriano was the white-washed village of Ostuni. A hilltop town that resembles the Santorini with its blue and white architecture, Ostuni is one of Puglia’s prettiest cities. Ostuni’s whitewashed buildings are adorned with blue shutters and abundant flowers. The fresh coat of white paint contrasts beautifully with bright green and blue shutters and the colorful bougainvillea that cascade from terraces.
The city center is small, containing numerous narrow alleyways that lead up to a cathedral and plaza. At every bend, our walk toward the city offered picture-perfect postcard views.
ALBEROBELLO: HOME OF THE TRULLI
Alberobello looks like it could be straight out of a fairy tale. One of the best towns in Puglia for lovers of architecture, the city has a particular building style that was common in the Itria Valley of Puglia during the 18th and 19th centuries. The architecture consists of conical stone huts called trulli. Today, some trulli lie abandoned in wheat fields, but others are still inhabited.
Alberobello has the highest concentration of Trulli. Such trulli exist nowhere else in the world. They have been deemed a UNESCO World Heritage site and heralded for their uniqueness.
Alberobello’s historic zone contains two parts—one that sees less traffic from tourism and, thus, gives a more authentic experience, and the other that is replete with souvenir shops and freshly painted houses. While most tourists wander solely into the touristy part, we explored the desolate, dusty streets of the less commercial area as well.
Our stops in Ostuni and Alberobello may have been brief, but they gave us the opportunity to see two unique and idyllic villages that–while crowded with Italian tourists–are very much under the radar for most international travelers.
CASTEL DEL MONTE
Castel del Monte was the penultimate pit stop on our Southern Italy road trip. Castel del Monte is a perfectly symmetrical fortress situated on a hill near Andria. One of the most impressive castles in Italy, Castel del Monte was constructed in the 13th century by Federico II, a powerful emperor of the Middle Ages. His castle has baffled history buffs. Unlike other Mediaeval castles, it has no moat, no living quarters and no practical defense structures.
When Frederick II built Castel del Monte, he imbued it with symbolic significance and mathematical and astronomical precision. UNESCO has praised the castle’s architecture as successfully blending elements of classical antiquity, Islamic architecture and Gothic styles. The organization has recognized the castle as being a unique place of historical and cultural significance.
What distinguishes Castel del Monte more than its absence of defensive characteristics, is its perfect symmetry. Castel del Monte’s structure adheres strictly to the Fibonacci sequence and has a particular astronomical significance. The perfection and uniqueness of its design suggests that Castel del Monte was built for a particular reason, though that reason is often debated. Some believe that instead of acting as a defensive fortress, the castle was perhaps a place of study or a meeting place for astronomers and mathematicians.
Whatever the reason for Castle del Monte’s construction, it remains as a beautiful testament to Italy’s unrivaled historical significance.
MATERA: A CITY BUILT IN ROCKS
While Matera is technically in Italy’s neighboring Basilicata province, its proximity to the Puglia border makes it an ideal stop on a Puglia road trip itinerary. The city–famous for its sassi (rocks)–is becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination in Italy.
Matera is often been regarded as the “Cappadocia of Italy” because of its trogdolyte dwellings carved into cliffs. The Matera cave dwellings reminded me of Matmata in Tunisia, not only because of its homes carved in rock, but also because both locations are so otherworldly that they have been immortalized in film. The rock-hewn houses of Matmata constitute the planet Tatooine in Star Wars and Matera is the setting of the Italian classic “Christ Stopped at Eboli.”
Its houses and churches are carved into a hillside overlooking a ravine. The soft, calcareous rock formed many natural caves and made creating refuge rather easy when the site was first settled in the Paleolithic era.
In the 1960’s the government deemed the houses in the Sassi “uncivilized, unhygienic” and “backwards.” It drove people out of their homes and moved them into modern, block apartments. Today, as a result, Matera’s network of caves are mostly vacant, save for the many cave hotels and restaurants that have reappropriated the space.
Dan and I spent the final day of our southern Italy road trip exploring the empty caves within the sassi. We admired the ancient frescoes in the the famous Rupestrian Churches, wandered the maze-like streets of the city, stayed in a Matera cave hotel, and visited the house of a lady whose husband grew up in the caves before the Italian government forcibly evicted Matera’s citizens from the ancient dwellings.
Matera is one of the most interesting destinations in Italy.
And considering the country’s already-lengthy list of places to see, Matera’s growing popularity speaks volumes.
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Those traveling to Italy for the first time rarely make it to the south. But southern Italy is filled with old-world charm, white sand beaches and unique architectural gems. If Puglia were a region in any other country, it would likely attract mass tourism and cruise ship crowds. Yet in a country like Italy–where there are more places to see per square mile than perhaps anywhere else on Earth–Puglia is often an afterthought.
Which, in my opinion, is all for the better.
For, considering the millions of tourists that flock to the country every year, finding places that are frequented by mainly Italians is truly something special.
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Additional Tips for Visiting Southern Italy
- The weather in Puglia is extremely hot in summer. While I visited Puglia in summer, I recommend traveling to Puglia during the shoulder season in May or September. August, in particular, sees sweltering temperatures. Avoiding August will also lessen the tourist crowds, as most Italians travel during their August holidays.
- Check out Deryl and Mindi’s blog, 2foodtrippers, for more information on visiting Puglia as a day trip from Matera.
