Apulia

Apulia is shaped by white towns, olive trees, limestone villages and the Adriatic light. Its coastline feels rooted in land and tradition, offering a slower form of Mediterranean pleasure built around food, craft and southern Italian simplicity.

Apulia — Puglia in Italian — runs some four hundred kilometres along the south-eastern edge of Italy, from the Gargano promontory to the tip of the Salento at Santa Maria di Leuca. Its landscape is flatter and drier than the rest of the south, a land of ancient olive trees, dry-stone walls and masserie, the fortified farmhouses that now often serve as country hotels.

Between Bari and Brindisi, the Itria Valley holds the conical trulli of Alberobello, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the white hill towns of Ostuni, Locorotondo and Cisternino. Further south, Lecce is a city of honey-coloured Baroque churches, and the Salento alternates sandy beaches on the Ionian with rocky coves on the Adriatic. The cooking — orecchiette, burrata, fresh fish and Primitivo — is reason enough to come.

May, June and September are the best months, warm enough for the sea and comfortable for exploring the towns. July and August are hot and busy, particularly around Ferragosto in mid-August, when Italian families arrive and the Salento fills with festivals. October brings the start of the olive harvest and is still often warm enough for lunch outdoors.

Summer evenings bring the region’s festivals: the Notte della Taranta, a celebration of the pizzica music of the Salento, culminates each August in Melpignano, and the Festival della Valle d’Itria presents opera in Martina Franca through July and early August. Winter is mild and quiet, and many coastal hotels close between November and March.

Apulia’s defining stays are its masserie, the fortified farmhouses of the coastal plain between Monopoli and Ostuni. Borgo Egnazia, built in the manner of a Puglian village near Savelletri, is the best known; close by, Masseria San Domenico keeps its olive groves, golf course and seawater spa, and Masseria Torre Maizza, a Rocco Forte Hotel, stands among the olives near the sea. Masseria Il Melograno, outside Monopoli, is quieter and more intimate.

These are independent houses, so LVXVRY advises on and arranges each stay directly — choosing between coast and countryside, combining a masseria with a few nights in Baroque Lecce or among the trulli of the Itria Valley, and organising the drivers, boats and restaurant tables the region rewards, from the Adriatic coast to the Salento.