Culture
15 Fun Facts About Puglia That Surprise Even Seasoned Travellers
You can love Italy for years and still not really know Puglia. The heel of the boot keeps its best stories quietly to itself: a saint who became Santa Claus, a grape that crossed the Atlantic and changed its name, olive trees that were already ancient when Rome was founded.
Here are fifteen fact-checked curiosities about Puglia that surprise even seasoned travellers, from history and food to caves, coast and a few myths worth clearing up.
Saints, Spartans and ancient Greeks
The real Santa Claus is buried in Bari
The bones of Saint Nicholas of Myra, the 4th-century bishop who inspired Father Christmas, have rested in the crypt of the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari since 1087, when 62 sailors carried them off from what is now Turkey. Bari holds the larger share of his relics, and the city still draws Orthodox pilgrims from across the world. We tell the whole strange story in why the real Santa Claus is in Bari.
Taranto was the only colony Sparta ever founded
Warlike Sparta planted just one colony beyond its own shores, and it was here: Taras, today’s Taranto, established around 706 BC. It was settled by the Partheniae, men born back home during a long war and later pushed out. For a few centuries it was one of the richest Greek cities in the whole Mediterranean.
Seven villages still speak a form of Greek
In the Grecia Salentina, a cluster of towns near Lecce including Calimera and Sternatia, older residents still speak Griko, a Greek dialect descended from the region’s ancient Greek and Byzantine past. It is endangered today, but still taught in some local schools and sung at festivals.
Italy sees its first sunrise in Puglia
Otranto is the easternmost town in Italy, and at nearby Punta Palascìa, the easternmost point of the mainland, the morning sun reaches Italian soil before anywhere else. On New Year’s morning, crowds gather on the headland to greet the first dawn of the year.
Food, wine and olive oil
Puglia makes most of Italy’s olive oil
With more than 60 million olive trees, this single region produces around 40 per cent of Italy’s olive oil in a normal year, and well over half in a bumper one, which is roughly 5 per cent of the entire world’s supply. It is the story of Puglia in a bottle, and we unpack it in our guide to Puglia olive oil.
Some olive trees were already old when Rome was founded
Puglia’s gnarled ulivi secolari can be a thousand years old, and a few are claimed at two to three thousand, among the oldest living trees in Europe. Since 2013 the Xylella bacterium has killed millions of them, a slow tragedy that has reshaped the Salento landscape.
Primitivo and California’s Zinfandel are the same grape
DNA profiling in the 1990s proved that Puglia’s Primitivo, California’s Zinfandel and an ancient Croatian variety are one and the same grape, simply grown and named differently in each place. Taste a glass of Primitivo di Manduria and you are drinking Zinfandel’s Mediterranean twin. More in our guide to Puglia’s wine grapes and where to go wine tasting.
Burrata was invented during a snowstorm
The oozing, cream-filled cheese the world now loves was created in Andria, in the 1950s, when a cheesemaker wrapped leftover cream inside mozzarella because snow had blocked the roads and nothing could be shipped. Burrata di Andria now carries protected status. It is one of many reasons to read what to eat in Puglia.
In Bari’s old town, grandmothers make pasta on the street
On Strada Arco Basso in Bari Vecchia, nicknamed the Strada delle Orecchiette, local women sit outside their doorways every morning, shaping "little ears" of pasta by hand with a knife and a thumb, then selling them to passers-by. It is one of the most photographed daily rituals in the south.
Trulli, white towns and baroque
Alberobello has more than 1,500 conical stone huts
Alberobello is a whole town of trulli, dry-stone houses with pointed limestone roofs built without mortar, clustered in the Rione Monti and Aia Piccola districts. UNESCO added them to the World Heritage list in 1996. You can even sleep in one.
You can hold a Puglian castle in your pocket
Castel del Monte, Frederick II’s mysterious 13th-century fortress near Andria, is built entirely around the number eight: an octagonal plan with eight octagonal towers. It is so iconic that it appears on the reverse of the Italian 1 cent euro coin.
Lecce is carved from stone soft enough to cut with a knife
Nicknamed the "Florence of the South", Lecce owes its extravagant Baroque churches to pietra leccese, a warm golden limestone so soft when freshly quarried that masons could sculpt cherubs and garlands into it before it hardened with age.
Ostuni is painted white because of the plague
The old town of Ostuni, the "White City", has been lime-washed since the 17th century, when locals found that whitewash made from limestone acted as a natural disinfectant and seemed to slow the spread of disease. Owners in the historic centre are still required to keep repainting.
Caves, coast and ancient forests
Under the countryside near Bari hides a two-mile cave system
The Grotte di Castellana run about three kilometres underground, opening with a vast sinkhole and ending at the Grotta Bianca, a chamber of dazzling white formations often billed as the whitest cave in the world.
Puglia has the longest coastline of any mainland Italian region
Roughly 800 kilometres of shore face two different seas, the Adriatic and the Ionian, meeting at the tip of Italy’s heel. Only the islands of Sardinia and Sicily have more coast, which is why Puglia has such an embarrassment of beaches. (Curious where the region actually sits? See where is Puglia.)
The Gargano hides one of Europe’s last ancient beech forests
On the spur of Italy’s boot, the Foresta Umbra’s primeval beech woods were added to UNESCO World Heritage in 2017. The wider Gargano is a biodiversity hotspot, home to around 65 species of wild orchid and a world away from the beaches most visitors picture. It is the green heart above towns like Vieste.
Three "facts" about Puglia that are actually wrong
Guidebooks and blogs repeat these confidently. They are not true, and getting them right is part of knowing the place.
- Santa Maria di Leuca is not the southernmost point of Italy. It is the tip of Puglia’s heel, where two seas meet, but mainland Italy reaches further south in Calabria, and the southernmost Italian soil of all is the island of Lampedusa.
- Puglia is not Italy’s largest wine region. It is consistently the second largest by volume, behind Veneto. It does, however, comfortably top the country for olive oil.
- Puglia’s folk cure for a spider bite was to dance, not to rest. In the ritual of tarantism, a person supposedly bitten by a tarantula was treated with hours of frenzied music and the pizzica dance. The tradition survives every summer at La Notte della Taranta.
None of this is why you book a trip to Puglia, but it is the kind of thing that makes the place stick with you once you are there. Pair it with the practical stuff in our Puglia travel tips and a 7-day itinerary, and you will arrive knowing more about the heel of Italy than most people who live in the north of it.
Raised in the province of Brindisi, 30 years in Puglia. About this site