The gravine and the Murgia

The Murge are a limestone plateau between four and six hundred metres, and from the road they look like an expanse of stone and pasture with nothing in it. In fact they are cut by dozens of gravine: narrow clefts carved by water, up to a hundred metres deep, which open suddenly and which you cannot see from the surface until you are on top of them.

The walls are pierced by hand-cut caves, lived in from the Middle Ages and sometimes into the twentieth century: they are cave villages, with houses, cisterns and frescoed churches. The largest complexes are at Massafra, Laterza, Ginosa and Gravina in Puglia, where an eighteenth-century aqueduct bridge spans the ravine.

The Alta Murgia

The northern part has been a national park since 2004: pasture, outcropping rock, dry-stone walls and very few trees, with lesser kestrels nesting in the towns. In the middle of it, alone on a hill, stands Castel del Monte, Frederick II's octagon, Unesco heritage since 1996. Nobody knows for certain whether it was a hunting lodge, an observatory or something else.

From here the sea is forty minutes away in any direction, and there are no campsites: you come for the day from the Bari coast or from the Salento. In summer the plateau is hot and without shade, and the gravine are best walked early in the morning.