Meandering around Southern Italy: Part 1

Puglia and a little of Lecce.

What a corner of the world! I’m not going to go crazy writing this time, I think I should let these photos speak for themselves. I probably will pop in and out of telling you what I think is important to note though…for instance food related finds. Ok mainly food related finds! But who doesn’t love a good gelato recommendation? Number one of which is Fior di Latte in Polignano a Mare.

One of the reasons that I came to this little part, or should I say heel (if you have a look at a world map or map of Italy you’ll get it 😉) of the world was to visit a little town that I’d heard about from my mum and dad. I’ve written a blog post about just this so if you’re keen for a few more details head over to my post about Alberello.

For now let me take you to Polignano a Mare.

One of the prettiest cove’s in Puglia! But we nearly didn’t make it there. The story goes something like this. My friend actually googled prettiest beaches in southern Italy before we booked this trip..and Polignano a Mare came up – pretty much this shot-

The thing is, we didn’t realise exactly where it was. The search results (well the one that we looked at) came up with the town of Bari as the destination. So we happily went off and booked flights to Bari and started looking up places to stay in the town.

I don’t know what made me think of this but when looking at air bnb’s I was looking at the map of bari so I could see where places were in relation to the beach and old town and I thought it was a bit strange that the coastline looked quite regular/straight – where was the narrow cove that formed the beautiful beach (above) that first drew us in?

After a bit of looking around I found the tiny cove and discovered that we actually wanted to stay about an hour south of Bari in Polignano a Mare! We were already planning to hire a car so this wasn’t so much of a problem…but imagine if we hadn’t discovered our mistake until arriving😨🤔.

Bari is actually really beautiful too and you’ll see in later photos of it that it’s well worth a visit and a stay as well. I just had a place in my head that I really wanted to visit and stay this time and this would have been one of my top travel curve balls if I hadn’t realised in time. If anyone has any better ones please share them with me!

I’m definitely more of a savoury breakfast person but if you can’t find a bakery that makes the delicious spinach and ricotta pastry pie thing or mozzarella and tomato pastry that we had our faces in in about 5 seconds flat, the almond friand type pastries you can find in all the local coffee shops are a pretty tasty accompaniment to your morning cappuccino.

And for a 👌🏼 pizza (and trust me I know my pizza) try Pizza e Fichi.

Monopoli. Oh my goodness. What a beautiful surprise Monopoli was. Any guesses for why we headed there? If you guessed because the name sounded too interesting and familiar not too, you’d be right. It’s a gorgeous little place, rain soaked or not.

The Monopoli Cathedral is a hands down can’t miss it experience. The exterior is a stone baroque beauty but walk inside and your draw will drop. Literally, I have a video (check my instagram story highlights) of my friend and my reaction when we walked in. We were expecting beautiful because all old churches in Europe seem to be like a combination of an art gallery and a museum, but we weren’t expecting this!

Massafra. A tiny little place we stopped off to explore. Full of winding streets flanked by sorbet coloured buildings in varying states of crumble. One of my favourite snaps from this little gem is of a tiny elderly couple making their way somewhere. We found ourselves walking the same street a little behind them and I couldn’t help capturing such a sweet moment.