The hook
Italy's heel: a baroque city carved out of butter-soft golden limestone, whitewashed hill towns, whole villages of conical drystone trulli houses, and several hundred kilometres of some of the clearest water in the Mediterranean.
01Why it's worth it
Puglia's appeal is real and specific. Lecce is the south's baroque showpiece, its local stone soft enough to carve into extravagant façades, and it's a living university town rather than a museum. Alberobello's trulli, round drystone huts with conical roofs built without mortar, are UNESCO-listed and genuinely strange, and the same buildings sit unposed in the countryside around Cisternino and Locorotondo. Ostuni is a white town on a hill above an ocean of ancient olive groves. And the Salento coast delivers: limestone caves and translucent water on the Adriatic side, long sandy beaches on the Ionian. The food is the region's own argument, orecchiette, burrata (invented here), extraordinary olive oil, cheap good wine. Be aware of the honest counter-case Italians themselves make: in August the prices are extortionate, the infrastructure creaks, and parts of the interior are flat and unlovely. Come outside peak, hire a car, and it repays.
02How to experience it
Base twice: Lecce or Otranto for the Salento, and a trulli town (Locorotondo, Cisternino) for the Valle d'Itria. See Alberobello early before the coach parties, then find trulli in the countryside. Alternate a town and a swim each day, eat orecchiette and burrata relentlessly, and avoid August entirely if you can.
From the locals
Italians recommend it and puncture it in the same thread. The case for: "In Puglia I'd stay in Lecce or Ostuni… Alberobello, Cisternino, Locorotondo… best southern cuisine." The case against, from a compatriot calling it the country's most overrated: "prezzi che ricordano una rapina a mano armata, zero infrastrutture… ma hey, il mare è oggettivamente molto bello. Almeno quello." Prices like an armed robbery, no infrastructure — but the sea is objectively beautiful. At least there's that.