Puglia travel & food magazine
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.
The rite of the tarantate has a precise address, and a date: 29 June.
Puglia does not have one dialect but at least four, different enough that speakers from opposite ends of the region struggle to understand each other.
Pizzica is the trance dance of the Salento, and the Notte della Taranta is the festival built around it. What it is, where it comes from, and how to go.
