No. 01 - Ostuni, the Valle d'Itria & the Adriatic Coast

Arriving earlier in the day? There are easy ways to fill the hours before the light turns. Swim at the Torre Guaceto nature reserve, about twenty minutes down on the coast. Take a first coffee or an early aperitivo at Burro Cafè in the old town. Or drive ten minutes to Carovigno for a drink at Picci Bar, an old salumeria that still has its vintage Peroni awning.

The whitewash is not decoration. Lime was cheap, reflected the heat and was believed to keep disease out of the plaster; what reads as a colour scheme began as the cheapest maintenance available.

Dinner in the old town at Osteria del Tempo Perso, dug into caves below the street — book before you arrive. An early night; Day Two starts among the trees.

Several estates will show you a frantoio ipogeo — an old olive mill cut into the rock below ground. The oil was pressed down here because the temperature stays constant all year, and mules turned the millstones in the dark. Lunch near Speziale: Il Cortiletto, whose house antipasto arrives as eighteen small plates, or the cheese counter at Caseificio Crovace, a plain roadside dairy with excellent fresh cheese. Somewhere in these same groves stands Pescetrullo, Gaetano Pesce's pink-and-blue polyurethane houses — a private rental rather than a monument, and the clearest sign that this landscape is still being argued with.

Afternoon at Torre Guaceto, the marine reserve north of Carovigno — dunes, a watchtower, and the only stretch of this coast protected before it was discovered. Dinner wherever you are sleeping; the estates here cook their own ground. Or drive into Carovigno for Già Sotto l'Arco, the one starred kitchen on this stretch, on the first floor of a palazzo off the corso — it wants booking well ahead.

Swim before the heat, and not from a lido: off the rock shelves below the Bini domes at Torre Cintola, at Porto Ghiacciolo under the abbey of Santo Stefano, where the ledges drop into deep water a few strokes out, or north of Polignano along Costa Ripagnola, a protected strip of low cliffs and small coves with nothing built on it. The middle of the day is not for the coast at all — sleep, stay behind a wall, or spend it indoors at the Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, the old slaughterhouse above the water that Polignano turned into a contemporary art museum for the Arte Povera sculptor who was born here. Polignano a Mare itself is the most photographed place in this half of Puglia, and from June to September it is packed from late morning until early evening. It is also extraordinary, and it belongs to whoever arrives after seven.

Walk out then to the terraces above the ravine, take the caffè speciale — coffee, cream, lemon zest and amaretto — at the bar that invented it, and eat fish on the shelf at Chichibio.

Then leave, and spend the day where the same building tradition never became an attraction. Locorotondo is laid out as a circle — that is what the name says — with a balcony over the whole basin and a white wine of its own. Cisternino, fifteen minutes on, is smaller and quieter.

Cisternino's dinner needs explaining: you choose your meat at a butcher's counter and they grill it and bring it to a table in the same room. Ask for bombette, rolled pork neck stuffed with cheese. Trattoria Bère Vecchie is the one to book.

The town also gives its name to a capocollo smoked over oak and almond shells and protected as a Slow Food presidium, which you can taste at any salumeria on the square.

Afternoon to Ceglie Messapica, twenty minutes east — a settlement two and a half thousand years old that has spent the last thirty becoming the best place to eat in the province. There is little to sightsee; you come here for the tables. Dinner at Cibus, in a fifteenth-century convent with its own cheese and cured meats, or Osteria da Giuseppe, where the menu is whatever came in that morning.

If you need a destination, the shortest one is Egnazia, on the shore at Savelletri: a Messapian town that became a Roman port on the Via Traiana, with a stretch of the original basalt road still visible and an acropolis you can walk with the sea on one side and nobody on the other. Forty minutes, and back before the heat.

Spend the afternoon in the water — the sea here stays warm enough to swim well into October. Dinner stays home, or goes to Savelletri for whatever came off the boats — Il Principe del Mare is plain, white-tableclothed and serious about crudi.

The workshops are open and the potters will talk. Studio Cromie, an old workshop turned residency and gallery, is where the town's contemporary argument lives; the botteghe along Via Crispi are where the four-hundred-year-old one is — Enza Fasano among them, where the old shapes are still thrown and then sent somewhere unexpected.

Twenty minutes further west, Taranto holds the strangest building in Puglia: Gio Ponti's Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio, finished in 1970. A concrete sail pierced by rows of openings stands in a pool of water in front of the church, built to be read against the sky rather than against the city — and the city, a working naval port, gives it no competition. Then the farewell dinner back east, on the coast or in the courtyard where you are sleeping. Order the crudi one last time.

Ninety minutes south, that sentence stops being true. Journey II starts there.

The day around it: Castel del Monte, Frederick II's octagon on its hill, and lunch at Antichi Sapori in Montegrosso, where Pietro Zito cooks from his own fields and three separate editors name it the best table in the region. Bari airport is forty minutes from Ruvo, which makes this the departure as much as the extension.