A horseshoe-shaped ravine wraps around the old town of Ginosa: frescoed rock churches and whole districts of cave houses open in the limestone canyon, a carved landscape that makes this Taranto-province town a close cousin of nearby Matera. On the rim, a Norman castle has watched the passage between the Murgia plateau and the sea for a thousand years.
And the sea is part of the deal: the municipality of 22,582 stretches down to Marina di Ginosa, where sandy Ionian beaches run behind pinewoods. Few places in Puglia put cave civilisation and beach umbrellas twenty minutes apart.
Near Ginosa
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
