Puglia can resemble Greece in its whitewashed hill towns, such as Ostuni in the central Murge hills, or Vieste, built into the rugged limestone cliffs above the Adriatic on the Promontorio del Gargano. Or Spain, in the southern baroque style of Lecce. Or the Near East, in the curlicued details of its Romanesque-era cathedrals, almost everywhere. Or it can resemble a world unto itself in the beehive-shaped dwellings of Alberobello.
So what does one do in Puglia? We spent a full seven days in the offseason, and I kept wishing for more time. In the end, we found ourselves too pressed to visit its most famous tourist attraction: Bari's Basilica di San Nicola, which holds the remains of the real Saint Nick, stolen by local sailors from his home in Turkey more than 800 years ago.
We drove -- a lot -- often in the wrong direction and generally through seas upon seas of olive trees and vines, all the way to the sun-drenched ports on the southern tip of the Salento peninsula. Puglia is way too vast to explore from one base. Our week-long itinerary took us hundreds of miles, beginning in the Promontorio del Gargano in the north and ending in Lecce and the Salento peninsula.
We walked -- a lot. We visited more ancient castles, churches and odd shrines than I can count -- among them the Basilica in Monte Sant'Angelo, built around the cave where the archangel Michael was said to have led a local bishop more than 1,500 years ago.
And we ate -- a lot. With so much of the day dedicated to the table, what else could we do? We found bargains everywhere, even with the dollar as limp as over-boiled tagliatelle .
On one of our last mornings in Puglia, our son summarized the trip this way: "We ate too much, we looked at too many buildings, and we always got lost."
Trulli Different
The center of Puglia's fashionable tourism is in the Valle D'Itria, the land of trulli .
Trulli are centuries-old stone and masonry cottages built from cylindrical room-size chambers -- each enclosed by conical stone roofs. Alberobello is the trulli capital, a village of more than a thousand still inhabited trulli, laid out side by side and topped with geometric pinnacles.
Walking through a neighborhood of whitewashed trulli with beaded doorway curtains and satellite dishes, many of the roofs painted with ancient Christian or astrological symbols, the effect is otherworldly. Is it Dr. Seuss, or some corner of ancient Byzantium? The magic is broken only when you hit one of Alberobello's main tourist streets, where the trulli are filled with souvenir shops hawking olive oil and liqueurs in trullo-shaped bottles.
Just as I was wondering where the trulli came from, I found a rather studious book titled "The TRULLI -- Where did they come from?" It explains that the dwellings proliferated around the 15th century in a complex tax scam. Local counts -- then under an Aragonese king -- allowed farmers and shepherds to build houses on feudal lands without mortar. By allowing dry "temporary" dwellings, the counts were able to avoid the king's taxes on urban areas while pocketing what they collected from the local peasantry.
Outside Alberobello, on the roads to Locorotondo and Cisternino, the countryside is loaded with storybook images: small walled farms with old trulli homes and perfectly disintegrating trulli ruins. Alongside them are trulli hotels, trulli restaurants and big neo-trulli vacation homes.
Dinner Theater
We stayed several days in nearby Martina Franca, a lively town with smart shops built around an old Ducal Palace and cathedral. Our hotel was a surprisingly modern place -- lots of black surfaces and glass -- wedged between a church and a park. At the desk was a friendly hostess, with long black hair and a black suit to match the interior, and I asked her about restaurant reservations, rattling off some of the names I'd found on English-language foodie Web sites.
