Puglia, and the houses built to vanish overnight

The trulli of Puglia's Itria Valley look, at first sight, like something out of a folk tale: round whitewashed houses topped with steep conical roofs of grey limestone, arranged in clusters across the countryside around Alberobello, Locorotondo and Cisternino. They are also, on closer inspection, a very practical piece of tax avoidance. Under the Kingdom of Naples, which ruled this part of southern Italy for centuries, new settlements were taxed once they were registered as permanent stone buildings. Local landowners in the seventeenth century got round this by having peasant farmers build entirely without mortar, using dry-stone techniques that let a roof, and if necessary an entire house, be dismantled quickly when a royal inspector was reported to be on his way, and rebuilt just as quickly once he had gone.

The technique worked well enough that Alberobello, where trulli were built more densely than anywhere else, eventually became a town in its own right, and remained one even after the Bourbon monarchy finally granted it official status in the early nineteenth century, by which point pulling the roofs down had presumably become more trouble than it was worth. The distinctive conical roofs, some of them marked with painted symbols whose meaning ranges from Christian to pre-Christian and is argued over rather than settled, are now protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a slightly ironic outcome for buildings originally designed to be invisible to the authorities.

A flat, dry landscape built for olives

Beyond the trulli, Puglia is defined by geography as much as by architecture. The heel of Italy is flat and dry by the country's standards, without the mountains that shape Tuscany or the Dolomites, and its poor, rocky soil turned out to suit one crop above all others: the olive. Puglia produces more olive oil than any other Italian region, from ancient, gnarled trees that in places have been harvested for centuries, and the region's cooking reflects that abundance directly, built around good bread, dried pasta shapes like orecchiette, and vegetables dressed simply enough that the oil itself does most of the work.

Matera, just across the regional line

A short distance inland, technically over the border in the neighbouring region of Basilicata but included in most Puglia itineraries for good reason, Matera adds a second act to this story of building with the landscape rather than against it. Its Sassi, cave dwellings carved directly into the soft limestone gorge that the old town overlooks, were inhabited more or less continuously from prehistory until the mid-twentieth century, when conditions there had become poor enough that the Italian government controversially relocated most of the population. Decades of restoration since have turned many of the same caves into hotels and restaurants, and Matera was named European Capital of Culture in 2019 in recognition of quite how far that transformation had come.

Ostuni, the "White City" on a hilltop above the Adriatic, and the baroque port of Lecce, carved from a local golden stone soft enough to work into elaborate decoration, round out a region that keeps finding new variations on the same basic idea: build with what the ground gives you, and Puglia's ground has given rather more than it first appears to. Lecce in particular earned the nickname "the Florence of the South" for the sheer density of baroque churches its stonemasons produced during a seventeenth-century building boom, working a limestone soft enough to carve while damp and hard enough to endure once it had dried in the sun.

The coastline adds a further layer worth a day away from the interior: Polignano a Mare, built on a limestone cliff with a small beach wedged into a cove directly beneath the old town, and the long stretch of the Salento peninsula further south, where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet at Italy's heel and the water turns the sort of clear turquoise usually associated with far more distant coastlines.

Late spring and early autumn are the most comfortable months for exploring the trulli and hill towns on foot; summer here is genuinely hot and, without much shade in the open countryside, better suited to a slower pace.