Adventures with Julia

September 21, 2023

We spent our last full day in Puglia with Silvia visiting 2 more towns in the Valle d’Itria and watching a cheese maker create his specialities of mozzarella and burrata cheeses.. The landscape consists of karst Murgia hills and large caves covered in dense vegetation and a cultivated plateau with red terrain that extends to the sea. The countryside is dotted with conical, white stone structures called trulli.

I was taken with these houses and wanted to see many of them. Here are a few of the offerings. We did get into an abandoned house Silvia knew about and that helped add to the story.

Our first stop in town was at a cafe shop called Bar Adula in Marina Franca. It was Silvia’s favorite place and we could understand why. The coffee choices were extensive and the best was a cold coffee drink called Granita Di Caffe that had an iced coffee mix at the bottom with dense whipped cream on top. Even I had to admit that it was excellent.

Once fortified with the coffee we walked under the entry arch into the Old City of Marina Franca. The first thing we saw was a statue of St Martino cutting his cloak in half in order to give half to a poor beggar. St Martin is the national patron saint of France.

We explored the Palazzo Ducale, a huge building that had belonged to the Caracciolo family of Naples. This family administered the town from 1600 to the 1800’s. Many rooms were frescoed with scenes from mythology and the Bible. Several doors were linked together to create a telescopic perspective with a baroque effect. An annual opera festival takes place here that is very popular, the Itria Valley Festival.

Martina Franca is the largest town in the valley with a population of 50,000. The town is named for St Martin and Franca refers to a tax free zone officially established in the 1300’s . The tax free zone helped establish the development of the area. Local products could be shipped in both directions to either sea. In the 1743 an earthquake damaged homes and public buildings. The new baroque style was used in new construction to good effect in the late 1700’s. Rococo decorations were also included in the structure. In front of the church is the Piazza Plebiscito.

Many buildings were originally built in the 1300’s, but an earthquake in 1743 caused much destruction. It was a good excuse to use the new, modern styles of Baroque and Rococo in late 1700’s construction, including the Basilica of San Martino, the Church of St Dominic and its attached cloister and many houses.

In front of St Martin’s Basilica is the Piazza Plebiscite. The piazza is surrounded by a covered archway that is popular for vendors in the summertime. Around the neighborhood we arrived at St Dominic Church, also from the late 1700’s. Attached to the church was the Dominican cloister, which is now used for a preschool. There were few people in the town. Almost no tourists. The streets provided very pleasant strolling with many upscale clothing stores. We found a store where Mark bought another shirt. This makes 3 new ones for him and one purple outfit for me. Enough!

We learned that many people who had lived in the town through the centuries had been very wealthy, but the younger generations turned to spending rather than investing and eventually they could not maintain their salacious homes, so they sold them. Today we see fancy entry doors, but plain walls on the rest of the building. New owners maintain the property as best they can. Here are a few.

A colorful scene of Martina Franca near the Basilica. From here we headed for the UNESCO Heritage site of Alberabello, which was begun in the 1500’s. The village is the town full of Trulli, round structures with cone shaped roofs that were dry-stacked. Many were whitewashed to protect the walls from crumbling as they built without cement. The people who initiated the structure were the Acquaviva Family. The first house was built in 1428. They paid no taxes because the roof was not permanent. By dry stacking, the owner could remove the roof and no longer have a taxable home, only a stable. As soon as the government taxing authority agreed there was nothing to tax and departed, the owner put the roof back on the building. The concept became popular. The town, having no taxable buildings, had no name either and was known as a ghost town.

Today Trulli houses are valuable as tourist attractions and second homes. Many of them are lived in full time and have all the conveniences of modern houses. Here is an abandoned countryside house Silvia found to explore. It had olive trees, and wheat fields. We pretended to be proud new purchasers of the fixer upper. This would be our 5th remodel. Nice huh.

We went into the town and found a Trullo house that the owner uses to attract tourist money. She does not live there but spends her days there to show off the place. Remodeling an old historic Trullo with a modern bathroom is illegal, but she has managed to get away with it because she did it before the restrictions took place.

We walked around the town an saw many trulli and eventually had enough.

From Albebello we headed into the countryside to a cheese factory called Itria Bonte and the home of the cheese maker, Georgio, He was a man of few words but oh could he make cheese. He took us through the process of making Mozzarella cheese, as well as burrata, which I much prefer. Mark, on the other hand, prefers mozzarella. I got so involved in the process that I forgot to take photos until we were standing with the finished products. After the demonstration, Georgio and his wife served the three of us lunch of a selection of cheeses, homemade salami, capicola, home made olives and wine and cheese cake for dessert.

We are at the end of our stay in Puglia and we have enjoyed every bit of it, just as our travel agent, Martina, said we would. Now we are headed for Sicily, where a whole new adventure begins.