The Valle d'Itria and the trulli
A plateau covered in conical houses, and four white towns looking down on it.
The Valle d'Itria is not a valley but a shallow basin between Bari, Brindisi and Taranto, and what makes it unusual is that the countryside is inhabited: instead of villages with fields around them there are thousands of scattered houses, nearly all trulli, among dry-stone walls, vines and olive trees.
A trullo is a round house with a conical roof built of stones laid one on another, without mortar. They have been built for centuries because the stone was there and the timber was not; the legend that they were built to be dismantled so as to dodge taxes is pleasant but unproven. At Alberobello there are over fifteen hundred of them in two quarters, and it has been Unesco heritage since 1996.
The towns
Locorotondo sits on a knoll and is entirely white, with its cummerse houses, roofed with pitched stone slabs. Cisternino is a maze of alleys where the butchers turn into grill rooms in the evening. Martina Franca has a baroque centre and an opera festival in July. Ostuni, just outside, is the white town proper, on top of a hill above the olive groves.
There are hardly any campsites here: you come up from the Adriatic coast in half an hour, from Ostuni or Monopoli. You do not drive into the old centres, and the car parks are just outside the walls.