2. An Italian Adventure - deeper into Puglia, further down the 'heel'

covering 22 - 25 April 2019

some of the tremendous Wisteria we've seen

I know that not everyone reading this knows us personally so I suppose I should explain that we’re travelling in our Motorhome (RV).  It’s about 20 foot of Fiat based van conversion, a MURVI Morello.  A very fine vehicle and already in the short time we’ve been away on this trip we’ve had to use the air-conditioning and the central heating.   As is usual for campsites in France and Italy, facilities are often woefully inadequate for the number of people who would be on the site in high season, or even medium season.  Sometimes a whole site with the potential for a hundred or more

our mobile home - the MURVI Morello

caravans or motorhomes will have two shower cubicles and two or three lavatories.  This far south in Italy lots of the lavatories are still the ‘continental’, a ceramic base with foot marks and a hole to squat over.  The standard lavatory bowl never has a lavatory seat.  Pretty primitive, really.  Campsites here are surprisingly few and far between and those that do exist are not all open at this time of year.  We’re fully contained but haven’t yet had to resort to ‘wild-camping’ which is a flash term meaning just stopping for the night somewhere unofficial.  Speaking of flash terms, I had to phone my doctor’s surgery for the results of an x-ray (all clear) and for “Result of Tests” had to press No.2 in order to speak to a Care Navigator !!

The regions we’re visiting in Italy on this trip are Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria, respectively the heel, instep and toe and an area which was and probably still is the poorest part of Italy.  Many Italians emigrated from here to the USA in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Based on the few photographs I’d seen I expected the whole of this southern part of Italy to be fairly arid, mountainous and relatively unpopulated.  The area we started in was Puglia and it met none of my imagined criteria.  It’s very fertile, flat as a pancake apart from the Gargano Peninsula and pretty well populated too.  After Gargano we travelled south to see Lecce, a city hailed as a particularly extravagant Baroque showpiece, with the showiest piece being the façade of the Basilica di Santa Croce.  It really appealed to me because someone called Marchese Grimaldi said it made him think

the painted facade over the real one
on the Basilica di Santa Croce

that a lunatic was having a nightmare.  Of course ‘slings and arrows’ come into play regularly and when we arrived the facade was completely covered up while restoration work was carried out.  This seems to happen a lot with us and restoration work.  Here there was at least a printed screen replica hanging over the front of the Basilica but no detail could be made out.  Lecce also has a Roman Amphitheatre a short distance away in the city which amazingly was only re-discovered in 1901 when some building work was being carried out.

a lovely countryside Trulli

and some town ones which seem to be a lot of Airbnb

Puglia, or at least a part of it is famous, relatively famous, I suppose for Trulli, the conical, stone beehive-like houses, most of which have a white tip.  They vary in size but are essentially one room each with the odd cluster of them being individual rooms of a bigger house.  They are rather odd and seem very impractical with one door, often no windows and a roof whose centre is perhaps fifteen feet high.  We saw no evidence that mezzanine floors had been installed or even shelving for storage but they clearly suited the people here.  What might they think of thatched cottages I wonder ?   For me, the Trulli look best in the countryside, single ones, on the edge of an olive grove

what looks like a residential street of Trulli

and with some flowers growing around them.  They all seem to be based in a fairly small area in and around a town called Alberobello and many are incorporated into modern buildings, just as Oast Houses are in Kent.  However, in Alberobello itself there are two whole hillsides of them, with a total of about 1,400 Trulli according to the books.   Very Italian in my view, stylish to wildly over-the-top with nothing much in between.   One of the hills in Alberobello is mostly residential Trulli with a lot of them being holiday lets and the other hillside seems to be almost all souvenir shops.   Surprise !  You can buy little models of Trulli or snow globes of Trulli and they’ve probably got Trulli Monopoly too but I didn’t see it.   

 

now wouldn't you agree that this is wildly over the top ?

We have seen some terrible driving in our travels over the years, from the frantic Indians cutting across a roundabout to take the shortest route to their chosen exit or along the wrong side of a dual carriageway with a horse and cart, to the Bolivians who will force a vehicle into the tiniest gap to prevent anyone else using the space even if it (as it often does) means jamming traffic solid.  However, I put the Italians as the worst drivers because they’re just so unpredictable.  I have decided to make this a short rant so here’s just one example of many options.   Joining a main road from a slip road.  You can see a car accelerating to join the main flow of traffic and merge in and then just before they do, they’ll regularly just slow down or even stop for no apparent reason.  In fact that sums up Italian drivers for me “no apparent reason”.  It used to be said that the definition of a split second in Italy was the time between the traffic lights changing and the car behind starting to hoot the horn.  That seems to have changed, horn hooting is clearly a lost art.

We’ve now finished with Puglia and moved westwards into Basilicata, a much more hilly and mountainous region and therefore scenically much more rewarding.  So there’s the topic for the next blog.