On and Off the Beaten Path: Puglia

By Carole Bell Ford

Steve and I met when we were teaching at a Junior High School in Brooklyn, in the late 1960s. During those years we and our colleagues-friends, other young schoolteachers, used to frequent an Italian restaurant in Little Italy called Puglia’s. We had no idea that Puglia was the name of an Italian province we would visit one day; we thought the restaurant was named after the owner’s family, and perhaps it was. That wouldn’t have been at all unusual as many Italian families took place names when they adopted surnames. This past October, Puglia was the last area we visited on a drive north to south drive through Italy.

Puglia (prounounced Poo-llia with the ll as in million, sometimes called Apuglia) is the southernmost province that runs along the Adriatic coast. It used to be one of the poorest in Italy but its economy has improved tremendously; today it produces the largest amount of olive oil and wine in the country. Puglia makes up Italy’s flat and fertile “heel,” beginning at the “spur,” the Gargano Peninsula, a promontory that extends into the sea. Much of the Gargano is a national park in which some unusual wild life is protected, such as the red heron, and a huge species of sea turtle (the Caretta Caretta) that can grow to a length of 6 ft. and weigh 1000 lbs.

The Gargano has a few small cities but mostly villages and farms that are separated with crude stone walls. Fields, vineyards and orchards, terraced with the same stone, produce the raw material for olive oil, various kinds of cheeses (including water-buffalo milk mozzarella and a local pecorino,) sweet and savory pies and cakes as well as—we can testify to this—some of the most wonderful bread, crusty and light. One of the Gargano’s special products is capers which grow on a shrub amid forests of Aleppo pines. They are the bud of the plant, which must be picked within the five days after they appear or they will bloom.

The Gargano, with its sandy beaches, is a paradise in the summertime. But other than the towns which are inhabited year round, the peninsula—its hotels, campgrounds, summer “villagio’s” (condos,) trattorias, bars, pizzerias—is almost deserted during the rest of the year. As we drove by these places, it was unsettling to see everything shut down so completely; it made me think of one of those “day-after” disaster movies, when all life in a small town is killed off by a germ from outer space. Everything was intact but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

We stopped for lunch in the town of Vieste, situated high over the Adriatic—just in time, they were just getting ready to shut down for the afternoon. But they were welcoming and very accommodating. We had an interesting conversation with the owner of the place, who does much of the cooking himself and recommended his seafood risotto. And, while I’m usually more successful in passing up dessert, this time I indulged in something wonderful called cassata flavored with limoncello liqueur.

Even with our stop for lunch it didn’t take very long to negotiate the remaining periphery of the peninsula and to get back to the highway.

One of the sights you see on the Italian highways are old Fiat 500s, “cinquecentos”; some are twenty years old, or more. They are very, very small; they only come up to your waist when you stand next to one of them. Once when we were in Italy, years ago, a cinquecento got stuck in the mud. Four men, normal-sized, simply lifted the rear end, moved it out of the rut, and then drove off. To me, the cars always looked like cartoons or circus cars. Nowadays they seem even more so when Italians, like Americans, like to drive substantial cars. To see them on the highway generates a mixture of amusement and fear. They look so cute, but they also look so vulnerable. I hope, because the Italians are used to them on the roads, they are careful of them.

As it was approaching evening we got off at Trani, a place we’d never heard of, but which looked on the map as if it would be large enough to have an open hotel. It turned out to be a lovely town with an interesting history.

Trani, the guide book says, was a lively port that was originally settled by Greeks in ancient times. But by the middle-ages, it was a flourishing center of Judaism, established after Islamic persecutions of Spanish Jews forced them to flee. In 1160, two hundred Jewish families lived in the city, including some noted Talmudic scholars. The Jewish quarter was in the heart of today's ancient city (in which the architecture if the period is still preserved). An enlightened ruler, Frederick II, granted the Jews of Trani special protection and privileges: Jews were the exclusive owners of dry-cleaning shops and the only ones allowed to trade raw silk. And only Jews could lend money and collect interest, since the laws of the Church forbade Christians to do so, controlling the interest rate at no more than ten percent. This limit was set by a ruling of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 which stated that the Church had to limit the "evil" of the Jews. (According to the Council, the Jews lacked respect for the ecclesiastical laws and would, therefore, strip Christians of all their riches.)Today Trani still has the appearance of a prosperous port. There is a real and active fishing industry there; the port is filled with boats, with fisherman on them, or working on them: on their nets and equipment.

 Further down along the seafront are Frederick’s Castle, with one of its walls dropping into the sea, and also the Duomo that was built between the years 1056 and 1186. It is named for Nicholas, the patron saint of the city. Not Santa Claus but a Greek pilgrim who, exhausted by his long journey, fainted and fell in what is now the Piazza Duomo.

This Duomo is exquisite, my favorite of all the churches and cathedrals—a lot—that  we’d seen on this trip: a simple Norman cathedral of sun-bleached white stone blocks, arched windows, and a steeple—a campanile—that rises five stories high along one side of the church and sits above an archway. Typical of the period, there are windows on each of the floors of the campanile: one window on the first; two windows created by a mullion, a vertical column that separates a window into multiple parts, on the second; a triple mullioned window on the third; and so on.

What a pleasant surprise this small city turned out to be, pure serendipity! We were so lucky to have stopped there. However, the next and last place we visited in Puglia was a place we sought out: the town of Alberobello, with its trulli, houses that look as if they were built for trolls, or dwarfs or Hobbits.

Alberobello is a protected town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, because it is made up of over 1,000 trulli which are residences but also shops, restaurants, a church, a post office—whatever you find in any town, except that they are all in these very curious buildings. Unless you’ve been in this part of Puglia, you have never seen trulli, they don’t exist anywhere else in the world.

Trulli are structures built of local limestone blocks; for the walls of the base, the blocks are stacked about 4 ft. high without mortar. They are either square or rectangular in shape with an arched entryway that is built into one of the walls. Then the base is whitewashed and topped with a cone shaped roof that is formed by placing flat stones in decreasingly concentric circles on top of the base. The roof is commonly decorated with ancient primitive, magic or Christian symbols. The origin of the trulli is not known, but they are believed to be variations on a Greek theme: probably first introduced in some form by Greek settlers or others from Asia Minor.

Each trullo is a one room house. To add another room, another trullo is placed next to the first, with arched doorways constructed inside, where the two meet. A third may be added in the same way, and a fourth. etc. Some large structures have ten and even twelve parts. Alberobello is in an area called the Murge di trull and which is dotted with these structures, both ancient and recently built.

As we drove away from the town, we saw many trulli, some in clusters or villages. And to make the landscape even more special, these were situated among vineyards and olive groves, with an occasional pomegranate tree set in just the right spot to add just the right bit of bright red color to the scene.

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