TMQE Travels 2021 || ITALY - Puglia: Alberobello, Polignano a Mare, Lecce (travel tips)

TMQE Travels are travelling again! This time it’s Puglia, the furthest south-east region of Italy, where we visit the Alberobello, Polignano a Mare, Lecce, Monopoli, Ostuni, Castel del Monte, Sant’Agata di Puglia, Otranto, Galipolli, Trani and the Grotta del Trullo.
Jérémy and Ben here again! We love to travel and to satisfy our wanderlust, we are on a European roadtrip exploring the best places for a city break on the continent. We love to escape Britain to experience the best culture, cuisine and attractions that Europe has to offer. If you’re a tourist like us and just need a good itinerary for what to do and how to do it when you’re in Milan, we will show you the best things to put on your itinerary.
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Transcript:
With olive groves and rugged coastline, Puglia is one of the more rustic parts of Italy. Located in the country’s south-east, Puglia includes what most people call the “heel” of Italy, also known as the Salentine Peninsula and including the cities of Bari and Lecce. It’s not very well-known in the UK, but to the French it is a beloved destination.
Resorts like Polignano al Mare are teaming with sun-worshipers, looking for a little strip of Mediterranean sand to go and lie on. Which is easier said than done, because the beaches aren’t massive.
When British people think about Italy, they tend to think of Rome, Venice, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, Milan and the lakes, even Sicily, but Puglia is proof there’s a whole lot more to it than that.
With the coastline littered with small fortified towns, Puglia distinctly has a colour scheme. The buildings are limestone or painted white, with cute little blue or green shutters. And all the boats are blue too! It’s simple, but absolutely beautiful.
Inland, Puglia borders the incredibly rustic Basilicata. With the Appenine Mountains forming the spine of Italy, the further inland you go, the more mountainous it becomes, with towns and villages clinging high on the mountainsides, built to take advantage of their vantage points across the valleys below. The views are absolutely spectacular from the top, but the streets are narrow, winding and Google maps gets completely lost when you’re zigzagging your way through the ancient alleyways. And while the coast is thoroughly used to welcoming tourists, the inland towns are a lot less prepared, so you’ll struggle to find anywhere for lunch when everything shuts for four hours in the middle of the day.
Toward the bottom of the heel and you come to the city of Lecce. If Lecce was in any other country, it would be trumpeted as the nation’s tourist hotspot, but because it lives in the permanent shadow of the other more famous Italian cities, it has remained relatively undiscovered. But there’s a reason why it’s known as the “Florence of the South”, with its medieval streets littered with Baroque architecture that could rival Rome itself. Because of its location, a city has been in this spot since before even the Romans, with a city existing here since at least the time of the Trojan War when it was colonised by the Mycenean Greeks. And the evidence of its long and glorious past can be seen throughout its remarkably preserved historic centre.
Puglia is the hottest part of Italy, with temperatures of forty plus degrees in summer not that uncommon. It borders the Adriatic Sea to the East, so the prevailing winds are coming from inland. But if you do need to cool down, I can think of worse places than heading underground to some of the remarkable Grottos that honeycomb the bedrock of parts of the area. We went to the Grotta del Trullo, which were remarkable caverns dripping with stalactites and stalagmites. So why is it called Grotta del Trullo? I’m glad you asked.Yes, but I know you wanted to. It’s because there’s a trullo on top of it! And what’s a trullo, you ask? Trullos are small whitewashed houses with stone cone roofs that are unique to this area of Italy. And nowhere can you see more of these distinctive buildings than in Alberobello.
The people of the area were forced to build trulli because their particularly mean landlords wanted them to live in structures that could be easily knocked down when they tired of having them living on their land. Trulli were traditionally dry-stone buildings, built without any mortar, which meant they could be dismantled easily and reduced to just a pile of stones. But thankfully, thousands of these have survived to the present day, with most of them here in this remarkable UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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