We just recently got back from Italy, aka ‘my favorite country’ and it was amazing! As you may know, we love to travel and discover new (for us!) places but Italy is a country we’ve been coming back to time and time again. I love it so much that I feel that I can write a love poem about it – it’s so varied and each part of it is different and unique – Emiglia Romagna and Lombardi in the North with it’s charming small-ish towns and delicious food is so different from the hustle and bustle of Rome with literally millennia of history at every corner, which is so different from barren landscapes of Basilicata in the south and seaside towns in Sicily and charming villages of Tuscany.
This time around we decided to explore the southern part of Italy – Basilicata and Puglia and finish the trip off in Rome.
Basilicata blew our minds – it was off the beaten path and really beautiful. We loved exploring Castelmezzano – a tiny town perched up high in the mountains – its probably the most spectacular setting of a town we’ve ever been to. They were hardly any tourists (we did not hear anyone speaking English) and we loved exploring it on our own:
Next up was Matera, which was our favorite spot of the whole trip! Part of Matera is declared a UNESCO World Heritage sight was and was one of the coolest sights we’ve seen – it looks like a 3 D lego puzzle! It reminded us of a cross of Valetta (in Malta) and Gordes (in France) – only bigger and more elaborate. There is so much history there – from rock churches (literally carved in the rock!!!) with 9th and 12th century frescos to 16th century cisterns to more ‘modern’ cathedrals (and by more modern we are talking about 16th 17th century!). This place should be on everyone’s travel list if you ask me!
After Basilicata we headed to Puglia (which seems to be on everyones To Visit) list. We spent a couple of nights at a masseria – a working olive oil farm:
and checked out Alberobello with its famous ‘truli’ that made us feel like we were visiting a land of gnomes:
Rocolotondo was pretty with it’s charming courtyards that reminded us of Cordoba in Spain:
Pogliano a Mare was crowded but worth a day trip:
Lecce – a complete Baroque overload:
And my favorite place in Puglia – Ostuni – is a charming little town that serves as a great base to explore the area:
And we finished the trip with a couple of days is Rome, which is my second favorite city in the world (in case you are wondering, NYC has my heart!)
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