Road Trip through Puglia – Introduction

Fall was approaching quickly and with it typical rainy weather in Switzerland. Time to escape for a little to somewhere nice and warm. I usually manage to make a compelling case with my wife to go somewhere far away and exotic at this time of year. Somehow that did not work out this year (not sure whether I was not convincing enough?). After some back and forth, we settled on a road trip through Italy’s Puglia province. Numerous factors contributed to our decision:

• off-season (always a must for me)
• weather was still supposed to be okay-ish (it turned out to be great)
• small distances to drive
• several towns to base ourselves in for a couple of days
• of course we knew the food would not disappoint
• easy to reach from Switzerland with several direct flights
• not as crowded with tourists (yet) as other parts of Italy

We settled on a 10 day itinerary with three three night stays and a one night stay. We would fly into Bari and leave again from Naples.

I’ll be grouping some of the towns together based on where we had our “base”: Monopoli, Sternatia (near Lecce), Ostuni and Matera. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about Puglia as much as we did exploring.