Things to do near Maruggio

Torre Colimena and the Salina dei Monaci

10′

Torre Colimena is a hamlet of a few streets around a sixteenth-century tower, one of those that passed signal fires along the coast. The story goes that in 1547, before the tower was built, about a hundred raiders landed right in the little harbour and went inland to plunder the farmsteads towards Avetrana. The name, they say, comes from the Greek kalì limèna, the good harbour: from the sea, the bay and the saltpan behind it looked like two harbours side by side. Go at sunset, when the flamingos stand still in the shallow water.

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Torre Ovo

10′

The tower stands on a step of rock called the Monte dell’Ovo. It can’t be visited: it is private and crumbling, dated by some to the fifteenth century, by others to the sixteenth. At its foot lie the ruins of an old tuna fishery; from the rock you can see in the water the remains of a little Roman harbour, perhaps even older: a university study puts a landing here in the fourth century BC. On the seabed lies the “petrified forest”: rock columns formed, geologists say, from ancient burrows in the sea floor.

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San Pietro in Bevagna and the Chidro

15′

Here the sea has a river all of its own. The Chidro rises from a spring a few hundred metres from the beach, widens into three small lakes and reaches the sea with its water at 18–20°C all year round. Seventy metres offshore lie some twenty unfinished sarcophagi of Greek marble, the cargo of a Roman ship from the third century. And when the rain won’t come, they say, people carry the painting of St Peter on their shoulders all the way here from Manduria, on foot, to ask for water.

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Punta Prosciutto

20′

White sand for kilometres, and water that stays shallow for tens of metres. Behind it are dunes up to eight metres high, with juniper and sea daffodils, inside a regional nature reserve. In front begins the Porto Cesareo marine protected area, one of the largest in Italy, where Caretta caretta turtles pass through. In dialect it is called Li Prisuddhi: some say from prisuttu, dried out, because of the shallow water, others because of the shape of the coast seen from the sea. In August, get there early.

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Manduria

20′

Until 1789 it was called Casalnuovo: the ancient name only became official again with a decree of Ferdinand IV. In front of the mother church two stone lions from the medieval church still stand guard, and the baptismal font bears the date 1534. Just behind it begins the giudecca, the Jewish quarter, closed off with walls and gates after 1510. Primitivo has its own museum in the nineteenth-century cisterns of the cooperative winery, among wine presses and carts. The Messapian walls and Pliny’s spring you’ll find in the Stories.

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Oria

25′

They call the cathedral “St Peter’s in miniature”, for its great dome of coloured tiles. It was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1743, and to pay for it two green marble columns were sold to the King of Naples; they now stand in the Reggia di Caserta. In a crypt beneath the church lie the mummified brothers of the Confraternity of Death; eleven, it is said, were soldiers who had fought the Turks at Otranto. Past the Porta degli Ebrei, a square bears the name of Shabbetai Donnolo, physician and astronomer, born here around 913.

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Grottaglie

25′

In Grottaglie pottery is still made in the rock. The potters’ quarter runs along a gravina, a ravine, at the foot of the castle, and the workshops are dug into the tufa, inside what were once olive mills. Look out for the capasoni, huge jars for wine and oil; the pumi, bud-shaped ornaments set on balconies for luck; and the pupa coi baffi, the doll with a moustache, which has a love story behind it. The bishops’ castle houses the ceramics museum; just outside town, the gravina del Fullonese hides three rock-cut churches.

Francavilla Fontana

25′

Legend has it that in 1310 a prince of Taranto, out hunting, found an image of the Madonna painted on a wall beside a fountain, and founded a village there free of taxes: a villa franca. Historians say the documents are forgeries; the feast on 14 September, though, is very real. The centre is Baroque and off the beaten track: the Imperiali castle with its four-arched stone loggia, and the basilica del Rosario, with a dome thirteen metres across, the highest in Salento.

Taranto

30′

Old Taranto stands on an island, between the Mar Grande and the Mar Piccolo. The Aragonese castle still belongs to the Navy, and it’s the sailors who show you round, free of charge. Next to it is the swing bridge: when a ship needs to pass, it opens in two. In the Mar Piccolo, freshwater springs well up from the seabed, the citri, about thirty of them, they say, and that is where Taranto’s mussels are farmed. In piazza Castello two Doric columns remain from a Greek temple, one of the oldest in Magna Graecia.

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Porto Cesareo

40′

Porto Cesareo is a fishing village that only became a separate municipality in 1975, breaking away from Nardò. A few metres off the harbour lies the Isola dei Conigli, Rabbit Island, with its pine wood: the name, they say, comes from an old rabbit farm. All around, a marine protected area reaches up to seven kilometres out to sea. At Torre Chianca, on the sandy seabed, five nine-metre marble columns still lie where a Roman ship lost them in the second century. In the village there is a small marine biology museum, founded in 1966.

Sant’Isidoro

40′

Sant’Isidoro takes its name from its sixteenth-century tower, which has no door on the ground floor: the only way in was by a staircase on the landward side, straight to the first floor. In front lies a crescent bay of fine sand, a kilometre long, sheltered by a small island that breaks the waves. Locally they call it Santu Sitru, and it’s where Copertino goes to the sea. It faces west: in the evening the sun goes down straight into the water.

Porto Selvaggio

45′

You walk down to the sea, through pines planted in the 1950s. Below is a pebble cove, and on the left the water is icy even in August, fed by freshwater springs. Locals call the Torre dell’Alto the tower of the Dannata, the damned woman: the story goes that a noblewoman, forced into an unwanted marriage, threw herself off it. In the Grotta del Cavallo, teeth were found that a study attributes to one of Europe’s first Homo sapiens. In the pine wood, a stele commemorates Renata Fonte, killed in 1984: she fought for this park.

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Lecce

1h

Lecce is made almost entirely of a single stone, Lecce stone: freshly quarried, it carves like butter, then hardens and takes on the colour of honey. Look closely at the façade of Santa Croce: below the balustrade, among the telamons, there are Turkish soldiers, a dragon and even the she-wolf of Rome. In piazza Sant’Oronzo, below street level, you can see a third of a Roman amphitheatre, discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century while digging for the Banca d’Italia. In the workshops of the old town, papier-mâché is still made.

Gallipoli

1h

Kallipolis, the beautiful city. The old town stands on an island a kilometre and a half round, joined to the mainland by a seventeenth-century bridge. Under the houses were dozens of rock-cut oil mills: this is where the lampante oil of our Stories set sail from, and its price was set on 6 December and sent all the way to the London exchange. The cathedral of Sant’Agata has no bell tower: the bells hang in a bell gable. At the entrance stands the Greek fountain: for the people of Gallipoli, it is the oldest in Italy.

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Ostuni

1h

Ostuni is white with lime, and there are three explanations: lime was cheap, it lit up the narrow alleys, and in the seventeenth century it was thought to ward off the plague. At the top of town stands the fifteenth-century cathedral, with three rose windows on its façade; the central one, they say, is among the largest in Italy. The Museo delle Monacelle holds the cast of the Donna di Ostuni, a twenty-year-old woman buried while pregnant some 28,000 years ago. Heading down to the sea you cross the plain of thousand-year-old olive trees.

Martina Franca

1h

Martina owes its name to St Martin, and the “Franca” to the tax exemptions granted in 1310 by a prince of Taranto. The centre is Baroque and Rococo, all wrought-iron balconies. In the Palazzo Ducale, now the town hall, the rooms are frescoed by Domenico Carella, and every summer since 1975 the Festival della Valle d’Itria has staged rare operas there. Before you head off, get some capocollo, smoked over fragno oak and almond shells.

Alberobello

1h

The famous trulli are here, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996: about a thousand in the Rione Monti, nearly all shops, and a few hundred in the Aia Piccola, still lived in. The story goes that they were built without mortar so they could be pulled down fast when the king’s inspectors arrived: it is a tradition, not a document. On the cones, look for the symbols painted in lime. The Trullo Sovrano, the only one with two floors, can be visited. We at Corni di Fiasco have just the one. But it’s Saracen.

Locorotondo and Cisternino

1h

Two white towns looking out over the same valley. Locorotondo has a round centre, as the name says, and the cummerse, houses with very steep stone-slab roofs; from the walk they call the Lungomare, the seafront, you see the Valle d’Itria, which has nothing of the sea about it. Its white DOC is made from verdeca and bianco d’Alessano. In Cisternino you go in through the old tower and dine at the fornelli pronti: choose your meat at the butcher’s, they grill it over the coals and you eat it right there outside.

Polignano a Mare

1h20

Polignano is perched on the cliff edge. Lama Monachile, the little pebble cove under the bridge, takes its name from the monk seals that once lived there; the bridge above is Bourbon, on the line of the Via Traiana. Domenico Modugno was born here in 1928, and his statue, on the seafront, opens its arms with its back to the sea. Go in through the Arco Marchesale of 1530 and look for the house with the clock its owner still winds by hand.

Monopoli

1h20

Monopoli has an old harbour full of gozzi, small wooden fishing boats, and a castle of Charles V that was a prison until 1969. Tradition has it that in 1117 the icon of the Madonna della Madia arrived from the sea on a raft, and that the beams of that raft were used to roof the cathedral: every 16 December, at dawn, the landing is re-enacted. To the south the coast opens into dozens of coves, as far as Capitolo; out in the countryside, medieval rock-cut churches lie hidden.

Otranto

1h30

On the cathedral floor a tree of life runs the length of the nave: a mosaic from 1163–1165, made by the workshop of a monk, Pantaleone. In it you’ll find Alexander the Great carried up to the sky by griffins, and even King Arthur. In a chapel, inside seven cabinets, are the bones of the eight hundred and thirteen martyrs, as tradition counts them, killed by the Ottomans in 1480. Outside the town is Punta Palascìa, the easternmost point of Italy: on New Year’s Eve people go there to wait for the first dawn.

Matera

1h45

The Sassi are houses and churches carved into the rock, lived in until the 1950s and 1960s, when a law emptied them, after Carlo Levi had written about that poverty. Today they are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first in southern Italy, and in 2019 Matera was European Capital of Culture. Pasolini chose it over Palestine to film his Gospel. On the far side of the ravine there are about a hundred and fifty rock-cut churches. On 2 July, for the feast of the Bruna, the papier-mâché float is torn to pieces in the piazza.

Santa Maria di Leuca

1h30

Leuca comes from leukós, white. Here Puglia ends, and so does the Acquedotto Pugliese, Puglia’s aqueduct, with a monumental waterfall from 1939 that runs down to the harbour and is only turned on for certain occasions, in summer. Above stand the basilica De Finibus Terrae, at the end of the earth, and the lighthouse, almost fifty metres tall, visible from more than forty kilometres away. Here, the story goes, St Peter landed, and on 15 August the Madonna goes in procession by sea. You see the caves from a boat.

Castro

1h30

Castro has its village up high, on a headland a hundred metres above the sea, and its fishing harbour below, at Castro Marina. Close by opens the Zinzulusa cave: the name comes from zinzuli, rags, because the stalactites hang down like tatters. In 2015, the dig at the temple of Athena turned up the bust of a statue that originally stood more than three metres tall. Some archaeologists think this is the harbour where Virgil has Aeneas land in Italy.