Puglia: Italy's heel has it all

Art gems
Medieval masterpieces are everywhere on the eastern coast, beginning with the inscrutable Castel del Monte. We know the octagonal castle was built by Emperor Frederick II, one of the most powerful men in the Middle Ages, in the early 13th century. But nobody quite knows why.

Isolated on a small hill, it lacks both the architecture and the location for a military fort, and it's way too imposing to be a pleasure palace. The most evocative hypothesis is that it was an intricate symbol, built around the magic intersection of astronomy, mathematics and the Christian faith.

Traveling south, the Romanesque cathedrals at Trani and Otranto seem to rise from the sea. The latter's floor is covered by a mosaic from 1165 representing the tree of life, a hopeful message in the site of a massacre — a chapel houses the remains of the 800 citizens who were slaughtered in the church where they had fled an assault by Islamic armies in 1481.

Puglia, like most of southern Italy, has been conquered over and over by northern and Mediterranean armies since Greek colonizers established flourishing city-states on its coasts. More than 2,500 years later, their heirs still speak Griko, a dialect of archaic Greek, in the inland Grecia Salentina.

Octopus to figs
I'll admit that the powerfully alcoholic red Salentine wine played a role in my dancing the pizzica pizzica, the local version of tarantella, one night in the streets of tiny Serrano.

Ivan Tortorella / AP "I Linguini del Pescatore" (Fisherman's Linguini) is fresh pasta with seafood, a typical dish in southern Italy's Puglia region, near Lecce.

But the food that went with it at the farmers' fair was just as worthy of celebrating, including Puglia's staple, orecchiette (ear-shaped pasta), as well as horse meat steaks, ciceri e tria (handmade tagliatelle with garbanzo beans), fave e cicoria (pureed fava beans and chicory), cakes spilling over with figs.

Meat, grilled or cured, reigns inland, nowhere more spectacularly than at Cisternino in trulli land. At night, the absurdly numerous butchers of this whitewashed village set up tiny tables on the sidewalks and cook to order whatever you select from their marble counters, preceded by minuscule black olives, homemade cheeses and salami.

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Seafood, including delicacies like octopus and sea urchins, rule the coast in hole-in-the-wall trattorie like Nonna Tetti in Lecce. I had a hard time finishing pignata di polpo there, when the whole octopus was brought to me in a clay pot — especially since I had already had mozzarella di bufala, fried vegetables, and linguine with mussels.

I needed similar endurance when gratitude compelled me to start my last dinner in Puglia with a humble pizza margherita. This must be the only region in Italy where the tomato-and-mozzarella staple of generations of students and workers still only costs about $2.50.

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Puglia is Italy's top olive oil producer, so, for 660 miles back to northern Italy, I carried a three-gallon tank of thick olive oil in front of my car seat, sheltering it from the sun that for two weeks hadn't stopped blazing and that pervades every facet of life here.

I kept thinking about a verse from an Italian poem that was used on an old tourism ad for southern Italy. Roughly translated, it was something like this: "No earthly hope can give my heart peace as much as the certainty of sun that overflows from your sky."

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