Apulia off the beaten track: inland villages far from the crowds

The Apulia that fills the summer feeds is a thin strip: the Salento coast, Alberobello, the coves between Polignano and Monopoli. But you only need to turn your back on the sea and climb up towards the hills to find another region. Anyone looking for the hidden villages of Apulia's interior has three different, almost always empty worlds ahead: the Monti Dauni to the north, the plateau of the Murge in the centre, the inland Salento of the Grecìa to the south. Pale stone, gravine ravines, frescoed Byzantine crypts and villages where in June you won't meet a single coach. Here's where to start.

The Monti Dauni

The Monti Dauni, in the province of Foggia, are the piece of Apulia that hardly anyone associates with the region: a chain of hills on the border with Campania and Molise, made of woods, transhumance drove roads and medieval villages. The ideal hub for this tour is Bovino, perched on a hill and dominated by its ducal castle. It's worth reading how a Roman bridge and a cathedral here recount millennia of comings and goings, and then walking through the old centre where the stone of the Romanesque cathedral and the bridge over the Cervaro hold the village's history together. Around it, a few kilometres away, are other stops that need no booking: Troia with its Romanesque cathedral and its eleven-ray rose window, Pietramontecorvino with the Terravecchia quarter carved into the rock, Orsara di Puglia with its sourdough bread baked in a wood-fired oven, and Sant'Agata di Puglia looking out over the Tavoliere plain. Celle San Vito, the smallest municipality in the region, still preserves Franco-Provençal.

The Murgia

Heading towards the centre, the Murgia opens up, a limestone plateau marked by the gravine, deep gorges where the Basilian monks carved out churches and dwellings. The gateway is Gravina in Puglia, which even takes its name from that rocky landscape: you descend into the Fondovito quarter carved into the tufa and explore the rock-cut crypts beneath the city, a maze of caves, cellars and hypogeal churches. Close by are Altamura, with its Frederician cathedral and its famous PDO bread, and Massafra, nicknamed the "Thebaid of Italy" for its density of rock-cut churches. In spring the Alta Murgia is covered in poppies: a landscape the summer sun wipes away.

The inland Salento

The most interesting Salento, for anyone wanting to avoid the crush, is not the one of the beaches but the one of the interior. In the Grecìa Salentina, the enclave where Griko is still spoken, you can visit the Byzantine village of Apigliano, vanished among the olive trees, an open-air medieval archaeological site near Martano. All around, villages the guidebooks skip: Soleto with its Gothic spire, Sternatia with the crypt of San Sebastiano, Specchia honoured among the most beautiful in Italy, and Carpignano Salentino, which guards ninth-century dated frescoes in the crypt of Santa Cristina. The real treasure of the inland Salento, though, is underground. The Crypt of the Crucifix at Ugento, carved into the rock, preserves overlapping Byzantine and Baroque frescoes — and if the subject grabs you, there's a second account of this sanctuary the Salento forgets. Further north, in the countryside around Brindisi, the crypt of San Biagio at San Vito dei Normanni hides a cycle of frescoes among the olive trees, far from any tourist car park.

On the coast too, outside the peak months, you can find places that are almost deserted. The ruins of Egnazia, a Messapian and Roman city on the Adriatic, are visited in a half-hour's drive from Ostuni without the crush of Pompeii; and in the cathedral of Otranto, overwhelmed by the crowds only at a few points, the Tree of Life laid out on the mosaic floor remains one of the most underrated medieval masterpieces in the Mediterranean.

How to plan it

A few practical notes. A car is all but indispensable: the distances between villages are short but public transport in the smaller towns is sparse. The best months are April, May, September and October, when the light is soft and the pale-stone old centres stay cool. Finally, many crypts and rock-cut sites open only by appointment or on a guided visit: a phone call to the local tourist office or the town hall before setting out saves you a closed door.