In Cisternino the butcher's shop is also a restaurant: at the "fornelli pronti" you choose your meat at the counter — bombette rolls, knife-point sausage — and they grill it on the spot, eaten at tables in the lanes. This ritual, more than any monument, explains the town: white, slow, happily concrete.
The old centre, among Italy's most beautiful, is a rise and fall of arches and courtyards overlooking the Itria Valley from the public-garden belvedere. Around, scattered trulli and the medieval church of Barsento: minor-key Puglia that is, in truth, the major one.
Near Cisternino
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
