Martina Franca

The name is half a saint and half a tax exemption: Martina comes from Saint Martin of Tours, on whose hill the first settlement grew, and the Franca was a gift from Prince Philip of Anjou on 12 August 1310, when he created here a zone free of taxes and duties to persuade people to come and live in it. It was called Franca Martina; then, once the privileges were lost, the adjective fell away, and only after unification, in 1861, did the town rename itself Martina Franca.

Here the baroque turned light: on the highest point of the Valle d'Itria, Martina is a white maze of lanes over which portals and balconies explode in the martinese style, with the Ducal Palace and the basilica of San Martino as its peaks. Every summer since 1975 the Festival della Valle d'Itria has brought rare opera and bel canto back to it. It is also the fortieth comune in Italy by area, and horses have been bred in its countryside since times hard to imagine: at Monte Fellone it was already done in the middle Neolithic, rare in the South and unique in Apulia. The other cult is the capocollo of Martina Franca, smoked with fragno oak bark: you taste it in the small shops with a glass of verdello. Trulli, dry-stone walls and fragno woods all around.