Monopoli

Under the olive groves of Monopoli there is an enormous void: in the Aratico district opens the cave of Santa Lucia, said to hold the second largest cavern in Italy — you go down a vertical shaft little more than a metre wide, and after twenty-five metres of darkness you come out on the vault of an elliptical hall roughly a hundred and seventy metres by fifty-six. Not far off, the Impalata chasm drops almost a hundred metres. It is pure karst: there are no watercourses on the surface, and they all run underneath.

Above ground, the old harbour is a palette: red and blue boats on green water, with the sixteenth-century walls and the castle of Charles V closing the scene. The old town, still lived in and unvarnished, opens onto urban coves like Cala Porta Vecchia, where you swim beneath the ramparts: along fifteen kilometres of coast there are more than twenty-five of them. The baroque cathedral keeps the Madia della Madonna, the raft of the founding legend. Inland the ground rises sharply on a step called Le Serre, and the countryside of the contrade lines up olives, trulli and fortified farmhouses up to four hundred metres. Monopoli is the Apulian answer for anyone who wants Polignano without the crush: ten minutes further on, a different scale.