Southern Italy

Puglia

More sun, more sea, more table. The south at its most generous.

Puglia has been quietly winning people over for years, and those who arrived early — the British couples who bought a trullo in the Valle d'Itria a decade ago, the Milanese families who traded apartment life for a masseria with an olive grove — are very smug about it. Rightly so. This is a region that rewards the decision to slow down.

The landscape is flat and open, which gives it a different feeling from the rest of Italy — more sky, longer light, the sense of space that comes with a horizon you can actually see. Ancient olive trees, some of them thousands of years old, line the country roads. The sea is never far: more than 800km of coastline, split between the clearer, calmer Adriatic to the east and the warmer, rougher Ionian to the south.

Cycling here is genuinely pleasurable — the flatness means you can cover long distances without effort, stopping at a masseria for a coffee or following a white gravel road to a deserted beach. Kite and windsurfing are popular on the Salento coast, where the wind is reliable and the water is spectacular. Horse riding through the countryside, long swims, early morning markets that smell of bread and tomatoes.

The food is straightforward, seasonal and very hard to improve on: orecchiette with bitter greens, fresh burrata, grilled fish, fava bean purée with wild chicory, Primitivo wine poured without ceremony. It's a cuisine that trusts its ingredients completely — and the ingredients here are exceptional.

800km of coastlineFlat cycling countryTrulli & masserieKitesurf & AdriaticBurrata & Primitivo