This is Italy's easternmost point: at dawn from Punta Palascìa, on clear days, you can see the mountains of Albania. Otranto carries the marks of that frontier — the skulls of the eight hundred martyrs of 1480 kept in its cathedral — and a stranger treasure: the mosaic floor of 1163-65, a tree of life covering the whole nave and mixing king Arthur, Alexander the Great and Noah's ark.
The town within its Aragonese walls lives on long evenings; to the south, the rust-red bauxite quarry and the Sant'Andrea sea stacks earn the detour.
Near Otranto
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
