Baroque turned weightless here: Martina Franca, on the Itria Valley's highest point, is a white labyrinth of lanes where portals and balconies in the local "martinese" style burst out, the Ducal Palace and basilica of San Martino as its peaks. Every summer since 1975, the Festival della Valle d'Itria has brought rare opera and belcanto back.
The other cult is Martina Franca capocollo, smoked over fragno-oak bark: taste it in tiny shops with a glass of verdello. Trulli, drystone walls and oak woods all around — hill-country Puglia at its finest.
Near Martina Franca
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
