Puglia Region Guide

Puglia offers a combination that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere in Italy: a long coast, serious architecture, exceptional food, and prices below the national average.

• Lecce's Baroque. The local pietra leccese is soft enough to carve like wood, which produced façades of a density found nowhere else. The 17th-century churches are extravagant even by Baroque standards.
• The trulli. Drystone dwellings with corbelled conical roofs, built without mortar. Alberobello has over 1,500 of them and has been UNESCO-listed since 1996, but they are scattered across the whole Valle d'Itria.
• Castel del Monte. An octagonal castle built for Frederick II around 1240 — eight sides, eight towers, no obvious military purpose and no certain explanation. Also UNESCO-listed.
• Coastline with real variety. Limestone cliffs and sea caves at Polignano, long sand beaches on the Ionian side, and the Tremiti islands offshore.
• Food that is cheap and excellent. Puglia's cooking is vegetable-led, wheat-based and deeply frugal in origin, which is exactly why it is good.

What it is not: compact. The region runs about 400 km end to end, and the Gargano and the Salento are a long way apart.

Puglia is long, and the most common mistake is trying to see all of it. Pick two of the four areas below.

The Valle d'Itria

The most photographed part of the region and the easiest base. Alberobello holds the densest concentration of trulli; Locorotondo and Martina Franca are working hill towns with whitewashed centres; Ostuni sits white on a hill above the olive plain. Many visitors stay in a converted masseria, a fortified farmhouse, which is the regional form of country hotel.

The Salento

Lecce is the anchor — a Baroque city with a Roman amphitheatre in its main square. From there, Otranto on the Adriatic holds a cathedral with a vast 12th-century mosaic floor, and Gallipoli sits on the Ionian side. The tip of the heel is dry, flat and hot, with sea on both sides.

The coast north of Bari

Polignano a Mare is built on cliffs above sea caves; Monopoli and Trani are working ports, and Trani's cathedral stands directly on the water. Inland is Castel del Monte.

The Gargano

The spur above the heel, and completely unlike the rest: limestone cliffs, the beech woods of the Foresta Umbra, the pilgrimage town of Monte Sant'Angelo, and boats to the Tremiti islands. It is the least Puglian-feeling part of Puglia and the furthest from everything else.

How long: a week covers the Valle d'Itria and either the Salento or the coast north of Bari. Adding the Gargano needs ten days.

Puglia's pressures have grown quickly — it went from overlooked to fashionable within about fifteen years — and it faces one environmental problem of a scale few regions do.

Xylella

The bacterium Xylella fastidiosa was identified in Salento olive groves in 2013 and has since killed millions of trees, including many that were centuries old. Large parts of the southern landscape are now standing deadwood, and the regional economy and identity were built on those groves. Visitors should expect to see it, and should respect plant-movement restrictions — carrying cuttings or plants out of quarantine zones is prohibited and is how the disease spreads.

Seasonal concentration

August is extreme. The Salento coast, Polignano and Alberobello absorb most of the year's visitors in a few weeks, and Italians holiday in the same period. May, June, September and October are warm, swimmable and far quieter.

Water

Puglia is one of Italy's driest regions and has historically depended on water piped from neighbouring Basilicata through the Apulian Aqueduct. Drought years bring restrictions. Ordinary care with water matters more here than in most of the country.

Alberobello

The trulli district is a living settlement as well as a monument, and parts of it have become almost entirely retail. Visiting the quieter Aia Piccola quarter, and spending in the surrounding towns rather than only in the souvenir streets, distributes the benefit better.

Taranto

The city has lived beside one of Europe's largest steelworks for decades, with serious documented consequences for air quality and public health. It is also a Magna Graecia site with an outstanding archaeological museum. Both facts are true, and the second is a good reason to go.

Puglia has one of the longest seasons in Italy, and the worth-avoiding part is narrow.

• April-May. Excellent. Wildflowers across the Murgia, comfortable walking weather, everything open and nothing crowded. The sea is still cold until late May.
• June. Warm, swimmable, and before the Italian holiday peak. Arguably the best single month.
• July-August. Very hot, regularly 33-38 °C inland with little shade on the Tavoliere and in the Salento. Also the busiest and most expensive period by a wide margin, with the coast full and accommodation booked months ahead. August is when the pizzica festivals run, culminating in the Notte della Taranta at Melpignano.
• September-October. The other strong window. Sea still warm from summer, heat gone, olive and grape harvests running, prices dropping sharply after the first week of September.
• November-March. Mild and often sunny on the coast, cool and wet inland, with the Gargano genuinely cold. Many coastal businesses close. The cities stay open and are at their emptiest, and this is olive-oil season — the new oil is pressed from late October.

Year-round relative cost index vs region average