Puglia travel & food magazine
Music, dialect, crafts and the feasts that still fill the streets.
At the end of the summer the Italian series Costanza brought back the name of Selvaggia of Staufen, Frederick II’s daughter. It was filmed between Verona and Vicenza, but the story begins in Puglia: Castelpagano, Castel del Monte, Lucera, Oria, Trani. The real places, and a three-day route.
At the end of August, in Puglia, the ones who came home go back. How that car was packed, what went into it and why – and a date that should not be forgotten: on 8 August 1956, 22 miners from Puglia died at Marcinelle.
After the 29th Notte della Taranta, the same argument returned: few local people on the staff, decisions taken elsewhere, the square emptying halfway through. The diagnosis is right, the culprit everyone names is wrong. The Salento has been selling what it has cheaply for five hundred years.
On 22 August 2026 tens of thousands of people will dance the pizzica in Melpignano at the 29th Notte della Taranta. For most of the twentieth century that same music was peasant music, best not mentioned in front of strangers. How an embarrassment became an identity.
Crates of tomatoes, the hand-cranked mill, the fizzy-drink bottles washed since January and the method called alla manta, which takes its name from the blankets: what the last Sunday of August looked like in an Apulian courtyard.
A Neanderthal skeleton fused into the rock of a cave, and still exactly where it fell.
In Puglia the presents came on the night of 5 December, not at Christmas.
Pietra leccese is soft enough to carve like wood and hardens in the air. That is why the city looks like this.
Built dry so they could be pulled down before the tax collector arrived. And the roofs carry signs.
A form of Greek that evolved in isolation for two thousand years. UNESCO lists it as endangered.
