Sunday,
April 13, 2008
POLIGNANO A MARE,
Italy -- Puglia has some of the brightest seas, most diverse art and
architecture, most mouthwatering peasant cuisine and kindest people in all of
Italy -- including strangers who will go out of their way to lead you to one
after another stunning beach on impossibly lapis-lazuli waters.
''I said put it
back, this is a natural park,'' a stern father told his son. He was pointing to
the octopus that sat with protruding eyes on the boy's shoulders after being
plucked from the crystalline waters at Natural Maritime Reserve of Torre Guaceto, just north of
With more than
500 miles of coast on two seas, the Adriatic and the Ionian,
At opposite ends
of this peninsula, I swam in the fingerlike cove of Porto Badisco,
where legend has it that
A few miles
north, it's all about sandy expanses, like Punta della
Suina, where the setting sun turns the transparent
water pink.
But it's Torre Guaceto that gets my gold medal -- for the baby-powder
white sand, the schools of silvery fish flitting from reef-like rock formations
in pools of turquoise water, and the scent of pine needles drifting from the
pristine forest that borders the beach.
LIVING
HISTORY
No other image
says
Of unknown origin
and unique to
Farther inland is
the Murge, scorched highlands grooved by
canyons where, in the Middle Ages, people built cave
dwellings as homes and churches when they fled from pirates.
The most famous
dwellings of all are thesassi in
CITIES AS
ART
Art is not a
masterpiece in a museum but a whole downtown in Valle d'Itria
cities like Locorotondo, or, by the coast, in
Locorotondo is a round nest of a
village where everything is white except for the bright splashes of red flowers
that overtake its wrought-iron balconies. Ostuni
is even more blinding, though a sea breeze caresses you as you hike up and down
its steep inclines and marvel at the sculpted baroque portals on its
whitewashed houses.
But you haven't
seen Baroque in all its theatrical, indulgent, luxuriant excess until you've
spent an evening among the wreaths of fruit and the pinup women sculpted on
the golden limestone churches and palaces of
By comparison,
the medieval downtown of Bari is austere, centered on the Basilica di San
Nicola, built between the 10th and 12th centuries to honor its patron saint
(yes, it's the real St. Nicholas, ``Santa Claus'').
The busy port
city is trying to overcome its dangerous reputation, but the only person that
chased us in the narrow alleys was a grocery store clerk with a cold bottle of
water, concerned that ours had become too warm as friends and I waited for
another clerk to make our sandwiches.
ART GEMS
Medieval
masterpieces are everywhere on the eastern coast, beginning with the inscrutable
Castel del Monte. We know the octagonal castle
was built by Emperor Frederick II, one of the most powerful men in the Middle Ages, in the early 13th century. But nobody quite
knows why.
Isolated on a
small hill, it lacks both the architecture and the location for a military
fort, and it's way too imposing to be a pleasure
palace. The most evocative hypothesis is that it was an intricate symbol, built
around the magic intersection of astronomy, mathematics and the Christian
faith.
Traveling south,
the Romanesque cathedrals at Trani and Otranto seem
to rise from the sea. The latter's floor is covered by a mosaic from 1165
representing the tree of life, a hopeful message in the site of a massacre -- a
chapel houses the remains of the 800 citizens who were slaughtered in the
church where they had fled an assault by Islamic armies in 1481.
OCTOPUS
TO FIGS
I'll admit that
the powerfully alcoholic red Salentine wine
played a role in my dancing the pizzica pizzica, the local version of tarantella, one night in the streets of tiny Serrano.
But the food that
went with it at the farmers' fair was just as worthy of celebrating, including Puglia's staple, orecchiette
(ear-shaped pasta), as well as horse meat steaks, ciceri e tria
(handmade tagliatelle with garbanzo beans), fave e cicoria
(pureed fava beans and chicory), cakes spilling over
with figs.
Meat, grilled or
cured, reigns inland, nowhere more spectacularly than
at Cisternino in trulli land. At night,
the absurdly numerous butchers of this whitewashed village set up tiny tables
on the sidewalks and cook to order whatever you select from their marble
counters, preceded by minuscule black olives, homemade cheeses and salami.
Seafood,
including delicacies like octopus and sea urchins, rule the coast in
hole-in-the-wall trattorie like Nonna
Tetti in
I needed similar
endurance when gratitude compelled me to start my last dinner in
I kept thinking
about a verse from an Italian poem that was used on an old tourism ad for
southern
PUGLIA: www.pugliaturismo.com or 011-39-08-3223-0111.
GETTING
THERE:
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