Puglia travel & food magazine
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.
Small rolls of lamb offal wrapped in caul fat and tied with the animal’s own gut, cooked over coals. What is inside them, why they have six names, and the four ways they are cooked.
The September 2026 calendar in the Salento: village sagre, patron saints’ feasts and the oldest wine festival in Italy, each one marked with whether the date is confirmed. Plus where to swim once the beaches empty out.
In Galatina, next to the pasticciotto, there is the africano: a sort of meringue made with the yolks instead of the whites. You will not find it anywhere else in Italy.
The full recipe: the pre-ferment, the exact proportions, the double baking that makes them properly hard, and the Salento way of soaking them with the sponza frise.
Baked twice until hard, cut with a thread, and wetted before eating. Three seconds, no more.
A collapsed sea cave forming a natural pool — swimming banned since 2019 — with over 3,000 ancient inscriptions on its walls.
Nardò, Melendugno, Otranto, Gallipoli and Vieste hold Legambiente’s Cinque Vele.
Cathedrals of light tens of metres high, built for four nights in July and then taken down.
