The Tavoliere of Capitanata, the largest Italian plain after Padania, is an immense field of prized durum wheat. The rest, the Terra di Bari and Terra d'Otranto, olive groves, vegetable gardens, orchards, vineyards.

Almond trees bloom in spring, the winding fig tree marks the sunny landscape. A great agricultural land (no longer pastoral, as when the flocks came down from the mountains of Abruzzo), green workshop.

Agrarian landscape, economic reality is hardly a motivation to travel.
So why come to Puglia?
For the sea, the sun and more. The sea of unspeakable coastlines of rocks, beaches, warm, transparent waters; the high sun in a sky so often cloudless, the sun that dazzles on the lime milk of village walls, draws the shifting shadows of olive groves, warm on the skin, illusorily dampened by the sea breeze.

The "other" has equal appeal. Four themes: the Gargano, the Gravina, the Romanesque, and the trullo.
Peninsula of the peninsula, the Gargano is an exciting sylloge of mountain, silent forest, congealed villages, rare vestiges, and aerial rocks over the sea. The Gravina is the ravine that sometimes splits the Murgia limestone plateaus: at Gravina in Puglia, at Massacra and elsewhere, churned up by caves, it was in the early Middle Ages intensively used to make troglodytic dwellings, oratories, monastic cells, and hypogeous little churches that, even for their Byzantine-print frescoes, constitute a singular and rare chapter in Italy's art heritage.

Apulian Romanesque is almost an expression of convenience to identify, in the very rich local artistic tradition, that astonishing moment in which they drew from this land of stone, by the mixing of very complicated influences and legacies (Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Lombard, northerners), an architecture of cathedrals and castles whose intelligent variety of ingenious and robust spaces never ceases to be explored is a sculpture of formidable vigor (it is no coincidence that, in documents, Nicola Pisano compie as "de Apulia," he was an émigré Apulian).

The creative moment is prolonged in the Gothic (which such must be said, at least by chronology, of Frederick's Castel del Monte) and is renewed once again in the imaginative "Lecce Baroque."

The trullo, the false-vaulted construction of limestone slabs that characterizes a part of the Murgia, and more than a building curiosity in this region of architectural vocation: it is the summary of the ancient relationship with the environment, it knows of the toil of the fields cleared palm by palm from the stones, of the fruits of the earth brought forth from the sod protected by countless dry stone walls, of the tenacity, enduring, of a suffered past whose flower we contemplate.