THE TRULLI OF THE VALLE D’ITRIA

At the heart of central Puglia lies the Valle d’Itria, a gentle plateau of vineyards, almond trees and olive groves dotted with one of the more unexpected architectural traditions in Europe: the trulli, small, whitewashed houses with conical, stone roofs built without mortar. The greatest concentration is in Alberobello, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, where more than 1,500 trulli crowd the slopes of two adjoining districts. The Rione Monti quarter alone contains around 1,000 of them, and the view across its cascading grey roofs from the Santa Lucia belvedere is one of the most photographed in southern Italy. Understandably, Alberobello’s beauty comes at a price and its narrow lanes are often congested with tourists, and many of the trulli have been turned into gift shops.

The story behind the trulli is, charmingly, one of tax avoidance. From the 15th century onwards, the local Counts of Conversano required farmers to build their houses using dry-stone methods so that the dwellings could be quickly dismantled when royal tax inspectors arrived, and quietly reassembled when they left. The technique survived long after the tax-collectors had gone, and the buildings remain remarkably cool in the heat of summer.

Around Alberobello, three villages give the valley its quieter character. Locorotondo, built in a perfect circle on a low hill, is famous for its whitewashed lanes, its cummerse houses with sharply pitched roofs, and its crisp white wines. Cisternino is the village to come to for an evening of grilled meat from one of its fornello pronto butcher-tavernas, where you choose your cut from the counter and it is grilled to order at a table outside, matched with bold Puglian red wine served in a colourful ceramic jug. And Martina Franca, the largest and most aristocratic of the four, is laid out around a quiet baroque centre of palazzi, churches and arcaded streets, a foretaste of what Lecce will deliver further south.

HONEYED LECCE THAT GLOWS GOLDEN

Down in the Salento, Lecce is the regional capital of southern Puglia and one of the most theatrically beautiful cities in Italy. Built almost entirely from pietra leccese, a soft, honey-coloured limestone that can, famously, be carved with a penknife, its centro storico is a sustained exercise in the local style known as Barocco Leccese. Between the late 16th and the end of the 17th century, almost every important building in the city was rebuilt in this style, and the facades remain astonishing: cherubs, columns, festoons of fruit and flowers, twisting balconies and gargoyles, all carved in stone the colour of caramel.

The high points are the Basilica di Santa Croce, with a rose window and a facade so dense with carving that it is sometimes described as a stone tapestry; the vast Piazza del Duomo, enclosed on three sides and entered through a single gateway; and the Roman amphitheatre half-buried at the city’s heart in Piazza Sant’Oronzo. Lecce is also, by some margin, the best place in Puglia for an evening of slow aperitivo, good food, shopping for artisan ceramics and carved olive wood and lingering over a late-night ice cream.

FARMHOUSE CHIC

The masseria, perhaps more than any other building, defines the Puglian countryside. These are fortified agricultural estates, masseria derives from the Latin massa, meaning farm, typically arranged around a central walled courtyard, with the landowner’s house above and the farmers’ quarters, stables, oil mills and storerooms below. Most of the masserie standing today date from the 16th century, when the threat of pirate raids and brigandage along the Adriatic coast made fortification a practical necessity.

Over the last two decades, a quiet wave of restoration has turned many of these buildings into some of the most distinctive places to stay in Italy. The best of them retain their original architecture intact, vaulted whitewashed rooms, stone floors, pebbled courtyards, working olive mills, while adding the discreet comforts of a contemporary villa, the best of which can be found by browsing our website. A morning at a masseria might begin with bread and ricotta on the courtyard table, followed by a long swim in a pool edged by olive trees, and end with a private cooking lesson in a kitchen built into the original frantoio.

OTRANTO, GALLIPOLI AND THE DEEP SALENTO

At the easternmost point of Italy, Otranto sits on a small natural harbour with a Norman cathedral whose floor is paved with one of the largest medieval mosaics in Europe, a twelfth-century tree of life that runs the full length of the nave. The town also carries a darker history as the site of the 1480 Ottoman siege, and the side chapel of the cathedral preserves the remains of the eight hundred locals who were martyred in its aftermath. Beyond Otranto, the coast runs south past low cliffs and tiny coves towards Santa Maria di Leuca, the southernmost point of the heel.

On the Ionian side, Gallipoli, whose Greek name means simply “beautiful city”, occupies a small island linked to the mainland by a 16th-century stone bridge. Its old town is a tight grid of whitewashed lanes wrapped around a baroque cathedral and a small fishing port still working at dawn. At night, Italians throng the lanes and the seafront; here are also excellent restaurants. The beaches to the north and south are among the loveliest on the Ionian coast: shallow, pale-sanded and improbably turquoise.