Bari day trips

Places to visit in Apulia (Puglia) that are near Bari

Bitonto - Bitonto is an ancient town (already prosperous by the 4th century BC), today renowned for some of the south's best olive oil and one of Apulia's best early Romanesque cathedrals. Its builders used Bari's San Nicola as their architectural model in 1175–1200 with even greater success... » more

★ Ruvo di Puglia - Back in the 5th to 3rd centuries BC—when Apulia was part of Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece—Ruvo was famous for its ceramics. The town's Museo Archeologico Nazionale Jatta may only have four rooms, but it contains one the best collections of Greek pottery in Europe—Greece included.... » more

★★ Castel del Monte - Norman king, poet, and architect Frederick II's Castel del Monte—a 1240 masterpiece of octagonal proportions—commands a 1780-foot hilltop, rising in the distance above wheat fields and olive groves like a vision, a geometric perfection of sharp lines and pale honey-gray stone with eight-sided towers at each corner.... » more

Altamura - Altamura has a lovely cathedral and an intriguing civic architecture that includes some 200 Arab-style claustri, ancient residential courtyards flanked by simple homes and entered by a narrow alley... » more

★ Trani - Though this busy fishing port has a few other late medieval churches scattered about the stony historic center, and a newly restored 13th-century castle built by Frederick II on the waterfront, it's the towering Romanesque Cathedral that draws visitors. Begun in 1099 at the very tip of the harbor, it rises stark white and grandiose against the blue of the water beyond—and provides some quite convenient shade for fishermen to mend their nets. ... » more

Barletta - Looking sternly over busy Corso V. Emanuele just off Corso Garibaldi, Barletta's Colosso is one of the largest ancient bronzes in existence. Historians believe that this 17-foot-high statue represents the AD 5th-century Eastern Roman emperor Marcian; locals sheepishly stuck a cross in his right hand to Christianize the thing.... » more

★★★ Alberobello - The unofficial capital of the storybook Valle d'Itria is rather touristy, but with two swatches of the townscape made almost entirely of the regions amazing ancient houses called trulli (and the rest of the town also simple and whitewashed), it is a sight to behold and a joy to wander... » more

★ Mottola - For thousands of years, the inhabitants of the instep of Italy's boot (inland from the northern gulf of the Ionian sea) burrowed into the soft, tufa sides of ravines and gullies to form la civiltà rupestre, a "cliff civilization." Pirate raids forced the the inhabitants of Móttola to abandon its ravine in the Dark Ages, but the walls of the Gravina di Petruscio valley southeast of town are still pockmarked by the "villagio ipogeo" they left behind. Sign up for a tour and you can visit San Nicola, known as the "Sistine Chapel" of cave churches, the wall slathered in twelfth-century frescoes. Look for the two pilgrims who painted tiny portraits of themselves into the thin strip dividing two competing scenes of St. George slaying the dragon.... » more

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