Touring Around Glorious Puglia

Some places are more archetypical than others - everything about them seems to represent a country or a region more than other areas within a national border - they are almost like cartoon figures whose every single inch seems to exude certain distinctive elements so that you are left in no doubt where you are…

Puglia is like that when it comes to representing Italy. It is somehow even more Italian than many other regions of that already highly characteristic country. 

Its food could only be Italian. The way people speak and act seems amazingly Italian. The countryside down in the south-east heel is generally less dramatic, but somehow it is more Italian than Tuscany or Umbria or anywhere else in that exciting land. It gets quietly on with the frenetic business of being Italian without making too much of a show and dance about it like they perhaps do in places like Naples or Sorrento.

Puglia is less touristy, more down to earth. The food is less showy, more what the hard working farming folk would eat. The wine less famous, but in some cases more delicious. The beaches less busy and crazy, but none the worse for that. The hills less steep and altitudinous, but more full of truly ancient interest. 

This is how the invite to the tour I joined began: “Dry stone walls, farms, ancient sheep tracks and underground olive oil presses tell ancient stories of distant peoples…” 

What my hosts from Discovery Puglia meant is that the south-eastern region of Italy was the first to come under the influence of the Greeks thousands of years ago. It was they who brought the concept of olive oil production to Italy - they who set up the first olive groves - and they who turned Puglia into a commercial crossroads.

The area I’m talking about specifically is a part of Puglia called Northern Salento, in the province of Brindisi. The towns you will see on a map are places like San Vito dei Normanni, San Michele Salentino, Carovigno, Ceglie, Villa Castelli, Ostuni and Fasano.

Throughout my short stay I stayed near Ostuni, perhaps the most famous of all the white towns, built on a hill above the Adriatic coastal plain. In fact, the masseria (an old farm converted for tourism purposes)where we stayed was down on the olive oil producing plain. 

A word also about Discovery Puglia - a small company run by the helpful and knowledgeable Concezio and his partner. The couple are devoted to what they call responsible tourism, respectful of the natural environment and the local traditions of the area.
“This is also the reason why we only use carefully chosen B&B, farmhouses and historic buildings where you will experience the best hospitality,” Concezio told me.

Do not over-order when you go to a restaurant in this part of Italy, even if you are hungry. No one ever walked out of an Apulia dining room feeling peckish, I promise you. 

We stayed in the Salento area in the Masseria Valente, an old fortified farm surrounded by a million olive trees. It was recently restored and so is now more a boutique hotel than a farm, but you can still see the underground olive mill cut into the rock under the main farmhouse. The cave and it oil production fittings will, in an instant, take you back two thousand years and somehow introduce you to the underlying theme of Puglia. 

It is hot, hence the desire to take things underground. It was also often threatened by outside forces - hence the fortification of farmhouses, villages and towns. And it is ancient. 

Oddly enough, our first outing had nothing to do with history. We went down the coast to visit the Coastal Dunes National Park - which is worth mentioning because this corner of the Italian shoreline is among the most unspoilt to found anywhere along the east coast. 

We also went south to visit the Torre Guacetto Nature Reserve where you can walk for hours through the scrub woodlands behind the dunes or find hidden sandy coves which are completely deckchair-free. If you said such a thing about a UK beach you’d raise eyebrows - but in Italy a sandy shoreline that is deckchair-free, and therefore empty of people, is a thing of note. 

After all that sea air a good lunch is needed - and, as I say, they do very good lunches indeed in Puglia. The sort of lunches that take up a major part of the day… 

Which is exactly what you get at the Masseria Il Frontoio where the restaurant is something of a shrine for the Italian based Slow Food Movement. In fact, re-watching an old Rick Stein Mediterranean food series I saw that he chose to have lunch at this place in the Puglia section of the programme. The first thing when you arrive is a fabulous old car, which the owner kindly let us have a drive in…

Actually, the owner was a delightfully enigmatic character. He told me he only employs “zero-kilometre cooks - not chefs” - by which he means the kitchen is run by local women from the hills around Ostuni who only use local organic ingredients and recipes. 

It’s worth repeating the Apulia food warning: an average lunch can be anything between five and ten courses - so go hungry and don’t be tempted to wolf down too heftily at the beginning…

And remember, you’ll have dinner to negotiate in just a few hours - which is what we did at the Masseria Borgo San Marco. In a hopeless attempt to make ourselves feel more peckish we marched around the 800 year old fortress, admiring the recently restored frescoes in the ancient community’s “cave church”. But the exercise wasn’t really enough to prepare us for yet another eight-course repast.

The people of Puglia are, as I’ve said, fond of caves and we visited others - one being at the San Biagio caves and crypt where the underground church deep in the countryside is the best part of 1000 years old. 

But any visit to a cave must be followed by lunch - and this time it was in a new restaurant not far away called the Urban Laboratory Exfadda. The place employs people who have some kind of disability and it serves some of the best food I consumed south of Bari. 

The town of Villa Castelli is another must-see place in the hills of Apulia. There are all manner of ancient buildings including many “trulli” for which the region is famous. Those are the traditional beehived shaped homesteads which were preferred because they helped keep out the harsh southern sun and heat. 

Ceglie, just up the road, is another fascinating town - made particularly interesting to foodies because it is home to the celebrated Mediterranean Cookery School. Watching the students there de-boning huge rabbit carcasses almost made me feel hungry. 

I say almost, because hungry isn’t really a word you can ever use in Puglia.

Martin visited Puglia as a guest of Discovery Puglia which arranges personalised tours of the region for extremely reasonable prices - check out  www.discoverypuglia.com

http://luxury.discoverypuglia.com

info@discoverypuglia.com