WE were bound for a farmhouse, and I had my doubts.
Like many seasoned travelers, I'd been burned by the promise of rustic lodging with multi-star amenities, a happy-sounding combination that often meant a working telephone in a stone chamber otherwise untouched by progress and its attendant conveniences, like reliable plumbing and regular maid service.
And the lodging in question was in the southern Italian region of Apulia, which I'd known to be an inconvenient place. I'd made work trips there in 2002 and 2003, when I was a reporter based in Rome, and had marveled at the cramped, drab airport in the region's largest city, Bari. It was fit for a Graham Greene novel, not a glossy travel brochure.
So when my friend Sylvie told me that old farmhouses less than an hour's drive south of Bari were being converted into cushy resorts, I felt more skepticism than curiosity. And when she gushed about the reputed beauteousness of the one she'd booked us into, I vowed to be charmed, not outraged, at the inevitable exposure of her gullibility. The vacation would go so much easier that way.
Early one afternoon last September, we pulled up to our agrarian idyll, and I searched in vain for any traces of a farmhouse in the airbrushed campus of smooth whitewashed buildings before us. The buildings were fringed by palm trees and latticed by tidy gravel paths. Off to their side glittered a huge, pristine swimming pool with a slatted wood deck. Beyond that, on the grounds of a sister “farmhouse,” the candlelit rooms of a full-service spa meandered through an underground cave of sorts.
We mentioned to the hotel staff that we were hungry, and within minutes pressed panini of mozzarella and prosciutto — along with glasses of inky, fruity red wine — were being placed on our table in a sleek lounge area with all-white furniture and lulling cross breezes.
This was pure luxury. It was also a barometer of what was happening in Apulia.
The Bari airport that I flew into this time around was new and much bigger than the old one, reflecting the heavy traffic of budget carriers and sun worshipers from England and Germany. Almost everywhere we went, we encountered a region with a tourist infrastructure much better developed, especially at the high end, than it had been, say, five years earlier. Apulia was entering that instantly recognizable (and somewhat oxymoronic) Mediterranean state of rustic fabulousness.
It's no wonder that, in conversation and print, Apulia is so frequently called the new or next Tuscany, a tired, trite sobriquet that will no doubt be trotted out for obscure Basilicata and hapless Molise — two of the country's poorest, least visited regions — if we just wait long enough.
But you'll find no Florence in Apulia. No Siena, either, though the city of Lecce, with its impressive Baroque churches, is an architectural showcase less seen than it deserves to be.
What you will find, in place of big revelations, is an accretion of the small, quiet moments that can be so rare in more trammeled patches of Italy, which is to say most of the country.
In sleepy Trani, which is like Portofino on Quaaludes, you'll stumble across the Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Pilgrim, a tawny, asymmetric Romanesque church completed in 1143 and set against an unusually vivid backdrop: the turquoise waters of the southern Adriatic. You'll peek inside the church and, unless it's the height of tourist season, notice something extraordinary. You've got the place to yourself.
In Lecce, you'll ring the bell at Cucina Casareccia, where everyone has told you to have dinner, but you'll wonder if you have the right address, because there's no clear sign out front and the door is locked. An older woman opens it, checks to make sure you have a reservation and leads you to one of no more than a dozen tables.
Perhaps 10 minutes later, she pulls up a chair so she can sit while she tells you, in Italian so patiently enunciated that almost anyone with a phrase book could follow along, what's being served that night. The marinated yellow peppers that kick off the meal are some of the sweetest you can ever hope to have. The veal meatballs that come later are some of the juiciest.
And on the paths to and from almost everywhere you go, you'll see what rapidly emerges as the defining image of Apulia, a scene that charms instead of dazzling, which is partly why it distills the region so well. A grove of aged olive trees, their branches and trunks as gnarled as nature gets, spread out behind one of the squat stone fences that seem to be countless in number and endless in reach. A lot of brawn has gone into this countryside, where a disproportionate amount of Italy's olives, grapes and grain is grown.
Apulia doesn't make sense as a primer for, or point of introduction to, a country whose most regal, accessible treasures and dramatic landscapes lie elsewhere. It's better considered and appreciated as a course in advanced Italian for the traveler who has already learned the grammar of Rome and Venice; conjugated the golden hills of Tuscany and the green ones of Umbria; been brought up to speed on all of the basics.
It's not only subtler but also more demanding. Unless you're a beach bum content to plant yourself on a few square feet of sand along Apulia's western or eastern coastline — as the spiky-tipped heel of the Italian boot, Apulia has shores facing each direction — you need to stay on the move.
There's no one city that can keep you fully engaged for more than a few days or makes an ideal base from which to take short, easy day trips. Bari's too far to the north, Lecce's too far to the south and Brindisi, which falls in between them, is simply too depressing.
Over the course of a week in Apulia, Sylvie and I drove and drove, seldom sure exactly where to stop, because Apulia doesn't make it obvious.
We knew we had to visit Alberobello, designated a Unesco World Heritage site in recognition of its dense cluster of trulli, the eccentric conical structures that dot the countryside south of Bari. They date back at least to the Middle Ages and may be even older, and look like sun-baked time shares for Keebler elves. Alberobello has scores of them, along with the smarts to milk them for all they're worth.
Signs around town direct you to the conjoined “Siamese trulli.” To the “smallest trullo in the world,” trullo being the singular form of the word. To the “sovereign trullo,” larger than others and situated on a bluff above them. More than a few of these trulli harbor souvenir shops, which of course sell miniature replicas of the very structures they inhabit. You'll have your fill of trulli by the time you leave, which may be as soon as 90 minutes after you've arrived.
We felt pulled not only to Alberobello but also to the tip of the heel, and we wisely took a long day for a slow drive there and back from Lecce. While much of Apulia's shoreline is flat, the eastern stretch between land's end and Otranto, a span of about 25 miles, represents a jaggedly beautiful exception, and it puts you so close to Greece, which parts of Apulia resemble, that at one point the only station we could get on our car radio was a Greek one.
We traced the curves, rises and dips of the road nearest the water, and it took us through tiny seaside towns with crescent-shaped beaches that were largely empty. Granted, we were past the peak of summer, but the weather was still warm enough in late September for sunbathing and swimming. We did both just a few miles north of Otranto, having ventured down a dirt road that dead-ended perhaps two dozen feet from the sea.
There were tall dunes all around us, and I clambered to the top of one, where I couldn't hear anything but surf and wind and couldn't see anyone else. I stood there for a good half-hour, unwilling to surrender this perch.
Like so much in Apulia, Lecce is quickly digested, but what a treat. Its compact historic center — where bicycles outnumber motor scooters or cars and fashionably dressed men and women walk tiny, puffy dogs — has the gentle, affluent feel of a northern Italian city like Parma or Ferrara.
It also has more than a half-dozen compelling Baroque churches, no two more than 10 minutes by foot apart, and they aren't lost in a crush of other architectural gems, the way the Baroque churches in Rome can be. To look at the spiraled columns on their facades, where stone animals frolic and cherubs preen, is to understand how badly a generation of builders wanted to jettison the clean lines and restraint of the Renaissance. This is exuberant, exultant art.
What Lecce doesn't have is a plethora of decent accommodations. The development of these has been lavished on or near the beach areas to its south, where the emergence of high-end boutique hotels — one fashioned from a former convent, another from a former tobacco factory — was the subject of a cover story in an issue of a major Italian travel magazine that was published during our trip.
Even more high-end development has occurred to its north, on or near a stretch of coastline between Bari and Brindisi, which are most foreign tourists' points of entry into Apulia. The coastal towns of Monopoli and Savelletri di Fasano lie at the center of this activity, and Monopoli presents a tidy, decidedly upscale emblem of it: La Peschiera, a five-star hotel that, despite its waterfront location, has seven discrete pools — some of them, admittedly, tiny ones — for just 11 rooms.
La Peschiera opened in 2002, the same year that Masseria Torre Coccaro in nearby Savelletri came along, reflecting Apulia's masseria boom. The word masseria refers to a fortified farmhouse — fortified in the sense that its turrets and walls were built to spot and deter invaders — and there are many of these structures situated a few miles back from the sea in Savelletri.
Over the last five years, one after another has been converted into a luxury accommodation with no more than a few dozen rooms, manicured grounds and, more likely than not, a spacious and eye-catching pool. The one at Torre Coccaro, which also has the underground spa, was built to resemble a Polynesian beach, replete with little thatch-roofed huts. Apulia's eagerness to woo the international jet set sometimes gets ahead of its good taste.
SYLVIE and I stayed next door, at Masseria Torre Maizza, which had opened four months earlier. Long before that, it was farmland, barns and storage areas. But old and new structures on the property had been integrated seamlessly into a tiny snow-white village with golf links around it and a library of scores of digital video discs. The plumbing and maid service were beyond reproach.
Torre Maizza was nearly empty when we arrived, but it filled up quickly the next day when an American bicycling group arrived. Bicyclists love Apulia, and they're all over the region: bicyclists in small groups, bicyclists in large groups, young bicyclists who hardly break a sweat, less young bicyclists earning the plate of orecchiette that they plan to have for dinner and trying to keep the ravages of time and gluttony at bay.
Apulia's expanses of relatively flat land are a pedaler's dream. So is the region's warm, dry weather. The usual reliability of sunshine was hammered home to us by what happened when heavy rains fell during our stay at the masseria. Dirt and stone roads that had been built without any worries of wetness flooded almost instantly, literally swallowing cars, including one that had been rented from the masseria by a British travel writer and her companion.
When last I saw her, one of the managers of the masseria was asking how she planned to pay for the car's repair, and she was shaking her head and repeating the words “act of God” over and over again.
This masseria was our base for drives to Apulia's version of hill towns, more pleasant than wildly picturesque and no competition for Todi or Assisi. Near the summit of one of them, Ostuni, we sought out a moody labyrinth of cobbled, white-walled passageways that we had read and heard about.
Twenty minutes later, we had walked down all of them. Twice.
A letdown? Not really, because in and around this maze we had a choice of several amusingly named restaurants. There was — to provide rough translations — the Restaurant of the Poor Man, the Restaurant of Jealousy and the Restaurant of Lost Time. We like the notion of squandering time. We went to that last one.
And for less than $60 dollars apiece, including plenty of wine, we had a terrific four-course meal brimming with Apulia's culinary trademarks. There was orecchiette, of course — those fat, ear-shaped nubs of pasta. There were chickpeas and broccoli rabe and cured meats seasoned with more pepper than in other parts of Italy and garnished with pomegranate seeds.
The food in Apulia is less instantly familiar than the food elsewhere in Italy. The wines — from such grapes as primitivo, negroamaro, verdeca and uva di troia— aren't as well known to Americans as those made from sangiovese and nebbiolo grapes further north.
And the restaurants and food stores exhibit a hospitality even more pronounced and easygoing than in other regions of Italy, because they've yet to be deluged with foreigners in the same way. At the restaurant U.P.E.P.I.D.D.E. in Ruvo di Puglia, the proprietor insisted on taking us into the back and showing us the cavernous stone rooms where he keeps thousands of bottles of wine.
And in Martina Franca, at a meat and salumi shop called Macelleria Romanelli Tommaso & Company, the proprietor decided that Sylvie and I really couldn't taste the salumi properly without some wine, so he hustled away, fetched two plastic glasses, opened a local red blend and poured us tall glasses of it.
Martina Franca is another of Apulia's hill towns, with even less bustle and fewer conventional sights than Ostuni. The half-hour we devoted to a jaunt through its center was long enough. But who needs glorious architecture and breathtaking views when you can lean against a glass counter brimming with artisanal sheep cheeses, shoot the breeze with a local butcher and try the special lardo di Martina Franca, which is sliced thicker than Tuscan lardo and has meat attached to the fat?
As the wine went to my head, I could feel Apulia working its way into my heart.
VISITOR INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
The easiest point of entry into Apulia is the city of Bari, and flying there from New York entails connecting through Milan or, better yet, Rome. Round-trip flights to Bari can be arranged through several carriers, including Delta, Continental and Alitalia, for coach fares that start at about $1,250.
A car is the best way to explore the region, and the Bari airport has offices of several major rental agencies. Some of the best rates are from Maggiore, a partner of National and Alamo; a weekly rental costs about 240 Euros for a compact car.
WHERE TO STAY
As you move through Apulia, which stretches more than 200 miles from north to south, you'll probably want to spend different nights in different places. North of Bari, in the sleepy but picturesque seaside town of Trani, you'll find the Hotel San Paolo al Convento (39-0883-482-949; www.sanpaoloalconvento.traniweb.it), which was carved out of a 15th-century convent. Doubles start at about 140 Euros.
Many old stone farmhouses around Savelletri di Fasano have been converted into small luxury resorts, and among the newest and most gleaming is Masseria Torre Maizza (39-0804-827-838; www.masseriatorremaizza.com), which has white-washed buildings, spacious rooms, a gorgeous pool with a slatted wood desk and spa facilities. Doubles start at about 300 euros.
In Lecce, a city of Baroque architectural treasures that can't be missed, almost anyone who wants a full-service hotel in the heart of the city stays at the Hotel Patria Palace (39-0832-245-111; www.patriapalacelecce.com), which faces the ornate facade of Santa Croce, one of the city's most ebullient Baroque churches. Some of the rooms on higher floors have lovely private patios. Doubles start at about 190 Euros.
WHERE TO EAT
Near the summit of the hilltop town of Ostuni you'll find the Osteria del Tempo Perso (Via G. Tanzarella Vitale, 47; (39-0831-303-320; www.osteriadeltempoperso.com). The rough translation of its name is the Restaurant of Lost Time, and you'll be happy to throw away a great many minutes at one of its tables. Make sure to get an antipasti assortment and give the pasta dishes priority over the meat dishes. Dinner for two with wine is about 90 euros. If a nighttime detour into Ruvo di Puglia makes sense, then the restaurant U.P.E.P.I.D.D.E. (Vico S. Angese, 2; 39-0803-613-879) is a must for its charming cavelike atmosphere, its terrific list of Italian wines from Apulia and other regions and its remarkably friendly service. Dinner for two is about 85 euros with wine.
In Lecce, the restaurant that everyone recommends is Cucina Casareccia (Via Colonnello Costadura, 19; 39-0832-245-178), and with good reason. It's tucked away in what looks and feels like a private home and it's a terrific showcase for the pasta dishes, beans and vegetables so prevalent in Apulian cuisine. Make a reservation, because the woman who answers the door when you ring the bell will ask you if you have one before letting you inside. Dinner for two with wine is about 80 euros.
The gorgeous drive from the southernmost tip of Apulia up its eastern coast will take you through Otranto, where you'll figure you should avoid the generic-looking restaurants on a beachfront stretch in the center of town. But stop at the Profumo di Mare pizzeria and restaurant on Lungo Mare Terra d'Otranto (39-0836-806-097), where the pizza is terrific and bottles of rosé and white wine — perfect for a sunny respite at one of the many outdoor tables — are reasonably priced. Lunch for two with wine is about 60 euros.
FRANK BRUNI is the restaurant critic of The New York Times.
