September in Puglia (Week 2 - Peschici to Bari)

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Monday, 8 September – Peschici to Vieste – We drove less than 30 kilometres along the coastal edge of the Gargano National Forest, in which the scent of acres of pine trees was very strong, to our next stop over, another ‘white city’ called Vieste. H.V. Morton describes the Puglia coastal towns as ‘(bearing) strong family likeness ... blindingly white ... clustered on the rim of the bluest of seas ... some upon sand ... others upon rocks ... above each one rose a cathedral’. I cannot best his description and agree completely with it. The old city of Vieste is built atop a jutting outcrop of white calcerous rock. Next to the town there are two large, straight, beaches. The rest of the coast is made up of gulfs and small, hidden sandy beaches. There are some twenty beaches within 20 kilometres of the city. Erosion by water and wind has shaped the calcareous rock of the coast into grottoes and arches. Vieste used to be just another Italian fishing village but now it’s a popular Adriactic beach destination. In mediaeval times, the port was frequently attacked by pirates and Saracens, and by enemies of the Kingdom of Naples. In 1554 around 5,000 inhabitants were executed by the Turks, on the grounds that they were too elderly or infirm to merit transportation into slavery. Both Vieste and Peschici are located on the Gargano peninsula at the coastal edge of the Gargano National Park which is still partly covered by the remains of an ancient forest, Foresta Umbra, the only remaining part in Italy of the ancient oak and beech forest that once covered most of Europe.

We drove around the edge of the town. We stopped at the tourist office but it was only open in the evenings after 5pm. We drove along the nearest two beaches in search of a small hotel. Joan inquired in a couple of them to get a sense of them and we then returned to the old city for a walkabout. We found a wine bar overlooking the sea with wifi and ordered coffee and searched online for accommodation. We found one we liked but were unable to proceed with a reservation as the wine bar owner was closing up for lunch! We wandered further along the narrow stone streets and stumbled upon the colourful local market. The large and permanent stalls were heavily stocked with flavoured liquors and local wines, local cheeses and preserved and bottled vegetables, buckets of olives. The shop attendants here were friendly and more assertive with offering samples of their wares than we had experienced in Orvieto; perhaps another trait adopted from north African influence. We sampled strong cheeses and very spicy olives. We finally found another bar, the Rock n Roll, in which to continue our internet search for a place to kip the night. (We had tried in two different cafes, without success. We are finding it more difficult to find good wifi connections in southern Italy than we did during four months of travel in South America.) Two life-size photos of Marilyn Monroe hung on the wall of the bar. She remains very popular in Vieste, as we had also noticed her image on the walls of a few other places during our walkabout.

We shared a large Peroni and reserved a room with an end-of-season 50% discount at the Hotel Yria via Booking.com. We returned to the car and drove back out along one of the beaches to the hotel where Joan immediately headed to the pool and I logged on and wrote this blog.

We walked back into the historic city centre in the evening for dinner. Joan inspected the menus of at least half a dozen potential restaurants but she had read a few reviews of a particular restaurant, called Taverna al Cantinone, and we continued our search for it. She even asked a waitress sitting outside a very cute restaurant, lovely room as well as tables set up in a descending dead-end alleyway and with great smells coming from its kitchen, how to get to Cantinone. We finally located it and secured the last table, and we are delighted that we persisted as it was the best meal we have had in Puglia so far. The two waiters were bustling and efficient and very friendly; the female waiter (who we later learned was the owner of the restaurant with her husband who was its chef) spoke very good English. As it turned out, she had spent five years in Killarney, which is where she met her Italian husband, who was working in an Italian restaurant there. She loved Ireland and especially missed the ‘scones’; she even said the word with a Cork accent! Her husband was a very creative chef. We shared a starter of aubergine rolled around a prawn and mint sauce. Joan had a main course of grilled fish that consisted of three small white fish and a red shrimp. I had a local pasta fruit del mar that was loaded with shell fish and calamari. The sauce was slightly sweet and when Joan asked the waitress she told us that the chef used a small portion of vegetable stock instead of plain water. It was all delicious. We drank a nice bottle of the local white wine with the meal. As we were leaving we noticed a copy of a book by Denis Cotter from Cafe Paradiso in Cork and commented on it to the waitress which was when she told us of her history with the area. Joan complimented her chef husband on his food and its creativity and told her that she was also a chef and had trained at Ballymaloe (something she doesn’t readily spout out). We talked with the waitress for a few minutes more about food and Ireland. Her face lit up as she talked about southern Ireland and especially that some Irish friends from there we coming to visit them at the end of the month! It was the perfect conclusion to a wonderful dining experience.

Tuesday, 9 September – Vieste – The hotel in Veste, Yria, has bicycles to borrow so we went for a cycle along the coast for about an hour this morning. It is a great feeling being out in the air and cycling along the sea, even if the borrowed bicycles were not very good. The rest of the day was spent catching up on emails and internet newspaper reading and writing facebook blogs, as we had a reasonable internet connection in this hotel. In the evening we walked back into the historic city centre and had a pizza at an a large open-air restaurant with a stunning view of the full moon rising over the sea. The restaurant was full of German families enjoying the last of their holidays. We had an incredible ice cream, rich and thick and very chocolate. We stopped at Dizzy’s Jazz Club on the way back to the hotel but it was closed. We were enjoying our stay in Vieste that we decided to extend to a third night.

In one of the little tourist brochures I always pick up when I see them, even if they are written in a language I can only partially understand, we read that this part of Puglia is the area most favoured by Italians for their summer holidays. And there are certainly a lot of them still here now even though it is the very end of the vacation season. There are also quite a few German families here. Many of the restaurants have their menus printed in German and we are often handed them even though we understand less German than Italian.

Wednesday, 10 September – Vieste – Early breakfast and a quick walk to the marina where we boarded a boat for a tour of the coast south of Vieste. The sea was calm and the boat not quite full. We cruised slowly along the coast, stopping and entering a number of the hollow grottoes found there. This part of Puglia is a large karst rock spur in which there are numerous caverns and sinkholes. This is what I have since learned about ‘karst’: Karst is a landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks including limestone, dolomite and gypsum. It is characterized by sinkholes, caves, and underground drainage. Nearly all surface karst features are formed by internal drainage, subsidence, and collapse triggered by the development of underlying caves. Rainwater becomes acidic as it comes in contact with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the soil. As it drains into fractures in the rock, the water begins to dissolve away the rock creating a network of passages. Over time, water flowing through the network continues to erode and enlarge the passages; this allows the plumbing system to transport increasingly larger amounts of water. This process of dissolution leads to the development of the caves, sinkholes, springs, and sinking streams typical of a karst landscape. That’s enough geology for one blog: suffice to say the rock formations we witnessed today looked strange and bizarre and a little bit moon-like. It was a very enjoyable morning on the sea. We stopped on a small beach to swim and sunbathe for about half an hour before returning to Vieste. Our only regret is that we were not quick enough to realize that we could have spent the day at the beach and returned on the afternoon tour boat instead. We didn’t think of this until we were already heading back.

We spent the afternoon baking in the hot sunshine at the hotel poolside with occasional forays into the cooling pool waters. In the evening we walked back into town for a casual dinner. I had a local speciality sandwich, the name of which I cannot remember, that was a large round toasted roll filled with diced tomatoes, cheese and spicy salami. Joan had a lasagne stuffed with a local cheese. We strolled the brightly-lit evening streets for the last time and stopped again at Dizzy’s Jazz Club. It was open. We walked down the stairs to the musty basement room. A life-size photo of Ron Carter greeted us at the base of the stairway. Three were three musicians playing electric guitar, electric bass guitar, and an organ were playing some kind of funk music that had no resemblance to jazz. There was no audience sitting in the half dozen couches facing the stage. We decided to ‘give it a miss’ and strolled along the beach front back to the hotel.

We were very impressed with the town of Vieste. While it was definitely ‘touristy’, it was also more ‘upmarket’ than Peschici. The shops offered a more interesting and varied range of gifts and crafts, including a range of very colourful liquors and handmade and hand-painted ceramics. And there were at least half a dozen restaurants that had passed Joan’s ‘menu inspection’ and that she would be happy to have tried (while we had a hard time finding a place in Peschici that passed pre-inspection). We enjoyed our leisurely strolls through the narrow stone alleyways of Vieste and felt very relaxed and comfortable there.

Thursday, 11 September – Vieste to Foggia – Today was a driving day. We filled up on the large breakfast (and made some sandwiches and borrowed some cakes for lunch from the large breakfast buffet). The breakfast buffet featured at least a dozen different kinds of cakes, and even I didn’t manage to try them all.

Our journey took us along the coast to the town of Mattinata. The road was corkscrew twisting. We drove slowly and enjoyed the vistas of the sea through the pines. We stopped and Joan spotted locals with bags from a market. We found it on the edge of the town. This was the area that we saw from the sea yesterday during our boat trip. It was large market on the edge of the town that occupied an hour of browsing time. The town itself was not distinctive; it had no medieval centre and most of the housing architecture was non-descript and box-like.

We drove inland and upward for nearly twenty kilometres to Monte Saint Angelo. This road was even more twisty and squiggly. The views from the town over the valley below were exceptional. The sanctuary here was established in 490AD following three apparitions of the Archangel Michael. Apparently, he left his footprints in the rocks there. From the 10^th Century onwards it has become a place of pilgrimage for crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, and also for popes, kings and queens and other notable figures including St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately, we arrived during siesta and it was closed so we didn’t get to see the angel’s footprints!

We descended twenty kilometres of still more winding roads to the sea side town of Manfredonia. As it was still siesta-time the downtown was deserted. We walked down the wide main street. At its end was the Castel Svevo-Angioino. It sits at the edge of the sea and its two cylindrical towers keep watch. We walked back along the sea front. A small marina and some warehouse buildings with a very strong rotten fish smell drove us back in the town. Manfredonia was unremarkable. It defined itself as a ‘city of oil’ and we certainly saw a great many vast olive orchards as we drove into it and later as continued on. We drove on and stopped in a park for lunch and a brief siesta on a park bench there.

From Manfredonia we continued driving south, this time on a much better and flatter road, through the agricultural lowlands, skirting north of Foggia and on to Lucera. Lucera defined itself as a ‘city of art’; we could find no evidence for this claim. Joan was quite keen to visit the 14-tower castle of Frederick II in the town. We found it quite easily on the hilltop at the town’s northern edge. All but two of the towers had partially collapsed, and the remaining towers were obviously restored with modern concrete blocks and mortar. The castle has a circumference of one kilometre but the path circling it is poorly maintained.

Friday, 12 November – Foggia to Bari

We began the day by driving into Foggia and walking around the town for two hours. We visited their long fruit and vegetable market that was packed with what seemed to be the entire population of the town. We viewed the mandatory churches and cathedrals during our walking tour. It is an unimposing and unimpressive city. A major wool market for centuries, Foggia is also an important agricultural centre for the wheat, vegetables, olives, grapes, fruit, tobacco, and cheese of the Puglia Tableland. It is known as the granary of Italy. It was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1731 and severely damaged in World War II. The capture of the Foggia military airfields in 1943 was an important action in consolidating the Allied position in southern Italy in World War II.

From Foggia we drove to Bari by a circuitous route that passed through Andria (where we stopped for a picnic lunch in the car park of the Norman-era cathedral) – Castel del Monte (where we stopped to visit this incredible iconic castle) – Trani (where we spent a few hours of the afternoon walking the narrow streets and around the bay and marina and wishing that we had arranged to stay the night here instead of reserving an apartment in Bari) – Bisceglie and Molfetta (where we only had time for a slow drive through their centres) and onward to Bari.

Andria is an agricultural and service centre, producing wine, olives and almonds. We drove through acres and acres of olive orchards and vineyards and cultivated fields on our way to Andria.

Castel del Monte’s octagonal prism shape with an octagonal tower at each corner is unique among Frederick’s constructions. Because of its relatively small size, and the fact that there was no evidence of a kitchen, bathrooms or sleeping quarters, it was considered to be no more than a "hunting lodge", a whim of Frederick II. Nobody actually lived here. Some scholars believe it originally had a curtain wall and did serve as a citadel. Castel del Monte is situated atop a small hill close to the monastery of Santa Maria del Mont and from this hilltop we were offered a 360 degree panorama of the Apulian countryside.

Trani is a ‘dead-cute’ village and a historic fishing port. It has an important twelfth century cathedral, San Nicola Pellegrino, which dominates the seashore from a spectacular position at the water's edge. Trani's defensive fortress, the Castle Svevo is on the shore just beyond the cathedral. It dates to 1249 and is one of the many castles built in southern Italy by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, one of the area's most interesting historical figures. Frederick II created quite a building boom during his reign! For a long period (up until the 1970s) the building was used as a prison.

We noticed that each of the towns we drove through both today and yesterday had their elaborate Christmas decorations already installed above and along their main thoroughfares and piazzas. They are a gaudy conglomeration of white plastic arches in ornate shapes and designs planted with many lights. It seemed a little bit out of place and slightly sad so many months before the eventful day but we are sure that they are a bright and glittering spectacle during the close and dark evenings of December!

Today we witnessed four wedding parties (but no funerals)!



We arrived in Bari around 8pm and were flustered to find the apartment. We used the GPS on Greg’s new Italian smart-phone and got ourselves close to the apartment and rang its owner. Alexandre came to our rescue as we had closed in on it. It was full dark and the traffic had been very heavy and hectic and nerve-wracking with impatient Italians heading home after their second half-day of work. The Italians are always in a hurry to get where they are going. Their driving has been getting worse the further south we travel. In this Mafia-controlled part of Italy, the rules of the road appear optional. There are sometimes three lanes of traffic squeezing into a single lane. Cars are double-parked. Stop signs are indications only to slow down and merge into the traffic by just sticking the front end of the car in the path of an oncoming vehicle forcing them to stop or at least slow down and let you out in front of them. This is accepted driving practice here; no one hoots their horn or gestures angrily. They just keep driving any which way!

Even though the apartment had a well-appointed kitchen, we asked Alexandre’s recommendation for a place close by in which to get a quick and decent meal. He sent us to Gustus where the perky waitress immediately adopted us and started explaining the menu in great detail. We were charmed and amused and couldn’t convince her that we already knew what ‘bruschetta’ was! We usually order different dishes in order to share and sample two dishes. But the waitress wouldn’t let us do that. She explained that it was more difficult for the chef to make one pasta dish with seafood and a second pasta dish with only clams. So we both had pasta with seafood and thoroughly enjoyed it!

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