Puglia: why Italy's heel is having its moment (and why we've been going for years)
Published 13 August 2026
Puglia: why we've been going for years
Every few years a region that has quietly done everything right for decades gets ‘discovered’, and Puglia is currently having that moment. New direct flights to Bari and Brindisi, a run of magazine features, and a steady flow of well-travelled friends coming back with photographs of whitewashed conical roofs and honey-coloured baroque churches have combined to put Italy's heel firmly on the list of places people now feel they ought to have been.
We have watched this happen with a certain wry familiarity. Puglia has been part of what we do at Expressions Holidays for a long time — not as a trend, but as a region that consistently delivered for clients who had already done Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast and wanted the same seriousness about food, architecture and hospitality without the crowds. What follows is not an attempt to persuade you that Puglia is fashionable. It is an explanation of what is actually there, most of which has been there all along.
Marcelle Hoff, MD of Expressions Holidays, says 'Puglia rewards the traveller who wants specificity — a particular olive oil from a particular grove, a particular baroque facade carved by a particular stonemason's workshop, a particular stretch of coast known properly only to people who live nearby. It does not reward the traveller looking for a single postcard view to tick off'.
Puglia has spent thirty years becoming exactly what people are now looking for
For most of the time we have been arranging holidays to Italy, clients asked for Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast, Rome, Venice. Puglia was the region we suggested to people who had already done those trips and wanted somewhere with the same quality of food, architecture and hospitality but without having done it three times already.
That has changed. Puglia has appeared on more ‘best of’ lists, more airline route announcements and more magazine covers in the past five years than in the previous twenty combined, and direct flights to Bari and Brindisi have made the region straightforward to reach for the first time. None of this is undeserved — what has changed is not Puglia, it is the number of people who have noticed.
We have been building relationships with hotels, drivers, wine estates and restaurant owners across the region since long before it needed discovering, and that groundwork now means we can get clients access and tables that a first-time visitor booking independently simply cannot.
The trulli of the Itria Valley have no real equivalent anywhere else in Europe
A trullo is a small circular dry-stone building with a conical roof, built without mortar using a technique specific to this part of Puglia — originally, according to local tradition, so that a house could be dismantled quickly if tax inspectors came to assess it for the crown. Whatever the truth of that story, the result is a vernacular architecture unlike anything else in Italy: whitewashed walls, grey stone cones, sometimes marked with painted symbols on the roof.
Alberobello has the largest concentration and the UNESCO World Heritage status, and is worth the visit, but it is also the busiest. The wider Itria Valley — Locorotondo, with its own distinct whitewashed centre, the quieter countryside around Cisternino — rewards those who want to see trulli as a living part of the landscape rather than a single concentrated attraction.
We favour a stay in a converted trullo or trullo complex outside the main towns, which gives clients the experience of these buildings as accommodation rather than as something seen through a coach window.
Lecce is one of the finest baroque cities in Europe, and one of the least visited
Lecce is built almost entirely from a local limestone, pietra leccese, soft enough to be carved with extraordinary detail and pale gold in colour, which gives the city's baroque architecture a warmth that stone cities further north do not have. The facade of the Basilica di Santa Croce, worked over more than a century by successive stonemasons, is as elaborate as anything produced in Rome or Naples in the same period.
What distinguishes Lecce from better-known baroque cities is the absence of crowds. Piazza del Duomo, enclosed and theatrical, can be experienced in something close to silence outside peak season. The old town is compact enough to explore properly in a day and interesting enough to justify two or three.
We include Lecce as a base for exploring Salento, the southern tip of the region, rather than as a single day trip — the city rewards an evening spent simply sitting in one of its piazzas as the light changes on the stonework.
The food is some of the most honest cooking in Italy
Puglia's cooking sits firmly within the tradition of cucina povera — food built from what the land and sea provide, without the refinement or expense associated with cooking further north. Orecchiette con le cime di rapa, the region's defining pasta dish, is turnip tops and a small ear-shaped pasta, given depth by good olive oil and little else. Puglia produces more olive oil than any other Italian region, and it is a genuinely different product from a bottle bought in a UK supermarket.
Burrata, now found on menus everywhere, was invented in Andria in the early twentieth century and is still best eaten there, within hours of being made. Along the coast, raw seafood — crudo, sea urchin, oysters pulled straight from the water at Taranto — is treated with a confidence that assumes the produce needs almost nothing done to it.
We arrange market visits, cooking sessions with local families and restaurant recommendations that favour the trattoria doing one thing well over the destination restaurant doing many things adequately.
Salento still carries traces of a Greek-speaking past
A cluster of villages in southern Salento, known collectively as the Grecìa Salentina, retained a Greek dialect called Griko into the twentieth century, a legacy of Byzantine and earlier Greek settlement in the region. The dialect has largely faded as a spoken language, but the folk culture it carried has not: the pizzica, a fast, percussive dance traditionally associated with the myth of tarantism — the belief that the dance could cure the bite of a tarantula — is still performed at village festivals across Salento.
The largest of these, the Notte della Taranta in Melpignano each August, has grown into one of the biggest folk music festivals in Europe, but smaller village sagre throughout the summer offer the same music and dancing without the scale.
For clients with a genuine interest in this history, we can arrange visits timed around these events, or simply a knowledgeable local guide who can explain what is being seen.
Planning a Puglia holiday with Expressions Holidays
Late May to late June is the period we recommend most consistently: the sea is warm enough to swim in, the countryside is still green, and the coastal towns have not yet reached peak season. September, after the worst of the summer heat and crowds have passed, is our second choice, with the added appeal of the olive harvest beginning in the groves around Andria and Bitonto.
July and August bring both intense heat and significant pressure on the coast — Polignano a Mare and the beaches of Salento can be genuinely difficult to enjoy at the height of summer, and this is when hotel rates are also highest.
October and November are quieter still and suit clients whose primary interest is food, wine and architecture rather than the beach — the olive harvest is in full swing and Lecce and the trulli towns are at their most peaceful.
Every Puglia holiday we design is built from scratch around the client — which coast, which towns, which balance of architecture, food and wine, and the masseria or hotel that suits the brief. The sample itineraries on our Puglia page show the kinds of holidays we arrange, and each of them is a starting point for a conversation rather than a fixed product.
To begin planning, call us on 01392 441245 Monday to Friday 9am to 5.30pm, Saturday 10am to 2pm, or email info@expressionsholidays.co.uk
