The best hill towns you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Bari
The Murgia rises quietly behind the Bari coast, a limestone plateau of drystone walls, sheep tracks and olive trees with trunks like rope. The towns up here are built from the rock they stand on, tufa and pale limestone that turns apricot late in the day, with narrow lanes climbing to a cathedral or a Norman keep. Food is plain and very good: bread baked in wood ovens and kept for days, fava purée with wild chicory, burrata and stracciatella from the dairies below, orecchiette dressed with turnip tops in winter. Spring and early autumn are best, when the plateau is green or gold and the evening air off the escarpment is cool enough for a jacket.
Most visitors to this part of Puglia head for Alberobello, where the trulli roofs cluster in their thousands and the coach parks fill by mid-morning. It deserves its reputation, and the Rione Monti really does look like nowhere else in Europe. But the town has been reshaped around the arrival of the day trip, and the shops along the main climb sell the same painted whistles and miniature cone roofs. In high summer the queue for a photograph outside a trullo is longer than the walk through it.
The same hills, the same stone, the same bread and the same railway keep going past the famous stop. The regional lines out of Bari, Ferrovie Appulo Lucane and the Sud Est among them, run inland through wheat and vineyard to towns with cave churches, sinkholes, ravines and Carnival floats, and fewer people get off at those stations. These are the hill towns on that network, each one an inland settlement we have confirmed you can reach without a car.
Of the 18 communes we have mapped in within 90 minutes of Bari, 10 qualify as hill towns you can reach by train: each is an inland hill settlement, and we have confirmed each is reachable without a car. The smallest, Irsina, has 4,449 residents.
If you are still choosing, we have also written The 9 best hill towns you can reach by train in the province of Bari and The best olive oil towns in the province of Bari.
Irsina
Why visit Irsina
Irsina sits on the border between Basilicata and Puglia, twenty-nine kilometers from Matera, where the Bradano flows below and separates the town from the Murge plateau. The historic centre occupies a tufaceous spur riddled beneath with rupestrian caves and cisterns, a settlement built as much downward as up.
The town's civic and religious history turned on a single commission. Raised to an archbishop's seat in 1452, Montepeloso saw its priest, Roberto de Mabilia, then working as an ecclesiastical notary in Padua, commission a young sculptor from that city to carve a Sant'Eufemia for his home town the following year.
The statue he sent back carries the old town's own coat of arms, the triple mountain and castle, in the saint's hand, binding the imported Renaissance object to the local heraldry it was made to honor. A hill town on a river border ended up holding, by way of a notary's commission to a distant workshop, a devotional statue that ties its Puglia-facing geography to a Veneto hand and its pre-1895 name to the stone the saint holds.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Irsina
- Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Thirteenth-century cathedral on the highest point of the borgo. Raised to an archbishop's seat in 1452, it holds the statue as its principal treasure.
- Sant'Eufemia di Mantegna. Carved from Nanto stone of the Veneto, the saint stands with a lion at her side. Identified as Andrea Mantegna's own work in 1996, confirmed by later scholars.
- Ipogei e cantine rupestri. Underground cellars, cisterns and rupestrian rooms cut into the tufaceous spur, reaching beneath the historic centre's alleys and houses.
How to get to Irsina
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 86 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the comfortable months in the Bradano hills, with green wheat fields and dry evenings at 548 meters. July and August touch the mid-thirties on the open spur but stay cool in the rupestrian cellars beneath the centro. November through March is quiet, the cathedral keeps shorter hours and the Mantegna can usually be seen without a queue.
Sammichele di Bari
Why visit Sammichele di Bari
Sammichele di Bari sits at 280 meters on the Murge plateau, thirty kilometers south of Bari. The settlement was founded as a fief in 1609 when the wealthy Genoese banker Michele Vaaz bought the territory from the Centurione family and named the new town after his patron saint.
The Castello Caracciolo at the centre of the village began as a Norman outpost, passed through Centurione and Vaaz ownership, and was bought by the Caracciolo dukes in 1797 who hired the architect Amenduni to redo the eastern façade in rusticated stone with neo-Gothic bifora windows. Since 1974 the castle has held the Museo della Civiltà Contadina Dino Bianco, one of the oldest and largest ethnographic museums in Italy, with over five thousand objects of nineteenth-century peasant life arranged over four floors.
The annual Sagra della Zampina on the last weekend of September celebrates the spiced spit-roasted pork sausage that the town claims as its own.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Sammichele di Bari
- Castello Caracciolo. Norman-origin castle bought by Michele Vaaz in 1609 and remodelled by the Caracciolo dukes in the nineteenth century with neo-Gothic windows.
- Museo della Civiltà Contadina Dino Bianco. Ethnographic museum inside the castle, founded by professor Dino Bianco in 1968, over five thousand objects of nineteenth-century rural life.
- Centro storico. Walled old town on the Murge plateau, laid out by Michele Vaaz from 1609 around the castle and the parish church of San Michele Arcangelo.
How to get to Sammichele di Bari
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 30 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the workable months on the Murge. July and August push past thirty-five degrees on the plateau and the centro storico empties between two and five. The late-September Sagra della Zampina falls at the edge of the heat and pulls a crowd from the metropolitan area.
Casamassima
Why visit Casamassima
Casamassima sits at 230 meters on the lower Murge slopes, twenty kilometers south of Bari. The village is known nationally as the Paese Azzurro, the blue town: the houses, palazzi and churches of the centro storico are coated in successive layers of blue-tinted quicklime, probably copper sulphate, in a tradition the locals trace to Duke Odoardo Vaaz.
In 1658 a plague carried by a ship into the port of Bari killed over twenty thousand residents of the capital. Vaaz, a feudal lord of Casamassima from a Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese origin who had bought the fief in 1609 for 76,000 ducats, vowed to the Madonna of Constantinople that he would paint his town blue if the village was spared.
It was. The small church of the Madonna di Costantinopoli still stands as the vow's fulfilment, and the blue lime has been retouched on the same buildings for nearly four centuries.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Casamassima
- Centro storico (Paese Azzurro). The blue town, an entire medieval quarter coated in successive layers of copper-blue quicklime since the 1658 plague vow, unique in Puglia.
- Palazzo Ducale Vaaz. Twelfth-century manor house turned ducal residence of the Sephardic Vaaz family from 1609, then of the D'Aponte family after the 1667 sale.
- Chiesa di Maria SS di Costantinopoli. Small church built as the fulfilment of Duke Vaaz's plague vow, the historical anchor of the blue-painting tradition.
How to get to Casamassima
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 22 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the months the Murge is mild and the blue centro storico photographs at its best, the lime cool against bright light. July and August reach the mid-thirties on the plateau and the painted lanes empty between two and five in the afternoon. The painter Vittorio Viviani came in the 1960s and built a body of work around the blue light; the Pro Loco still organises walks in his footsteps in spring and autumn.
Castellana Grotte
Why visit Castellana Grotte
Castellana Grotte sits on the south-eastern Murge at 290 meters, forty kilometers south of Bari and inland from Monopoli and Polignano. The town takes its name from the cave complex beneath it, reached in 1938 when a speleologist sent by the Italian Touring Club broke through a known sinkhole into the system running under the plateau.
The white alabaster chamber at the far end followed two years later. Above ground the town keeps a separate rhythm from what lies underneath it.
The walled center sits organized around the cathedral square, its mother church raised on Romanesque foundations with a Norman tower pressed into service as a bell tower. On the hilltop above, the sanctuary built after the 1690 plague draws the January procession that carries the Madonna statue down from the Capuchin convent to that same mother church, tying the two sacred points of the town together once a year.
The place works on two levels literally: a plateau town of stone alleys and church squares going about its own history, sitting on top of a cave system that has nothing to do with it except the name.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Castellana Grotte
- Grotte di Castellana. Galleries descend from a sinkhole known as La Grave into stalactite and stalagmite formations underfoot, with Franco Anelli's route ending at the alabaster chamber of the Grotta Bianca.
- Chiesa Madre di San Leone Magno. Romanesque mother church rebuilt in 1383, three naves under round arches, with a Norman defensive tower converted into the bell tower.
- Santuario di Santa Maria della Vetrana. Hilltop sanctuary built in thanks for deliverance from plague, the destination of the January procession that carries the Madonna statue from the Capuchin convent.
How to get to Castellana Grotte
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 47 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the workable months on the Murge: dry, clear, the caves a constant fifteen degrees regardless of the surface weather. July and August reach the mid-thirties above ground but the cave itinerary stays cold enough for a jacket. The plateau countryside empties between two and five in the afternoon.
Acquaviva delle Fonti
Why visit Acquaviva delle Fonti
Acquaviva delle Fonti sits on the Murge plateau at 300 meters, twenty-five kilometers south of Bari and the same distance from the Adriatic. The name records the springs that fed the town long before the Normans arrived.
The Co-Cathedral of Sant'Eustachio was built in 1158 on Messapian foundations by the Norman lord Roberto Gurguglione, then rebuilt in Renaissance style in the late sixteenth century by Count Alberto Acquaviva d'Aragona; its façade carries a sixteen-arm rose window that is the building's signature. The Palazzo de Mari, now the town hall, anchors the centro storico opposite the cathedral.
The town is best known nationally for the cipolla rossa di Acquaviva, a sweet DOP red onion grown only in local clay-rich soils and celebrated with a late-July sagra and a mid-October festival built around the calzone di cipolla. The ecclesiastical Miulli hospital, one of the largest in Puglia, sits at the edge of town.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Acquaviva delle Fonti
- Concattedrale di Sant'Eustachio. Romanesque cathedral of 1158 rebuilt in Renaissance style by the Acquaviva d'Aragona counts, with a sixteen-arm rose window over the central portal.
- Palazzo de Mari. Sixteenth-century noble residence on the cathedral square, now the town hall, built by the de Mari family after they acquired the fief.
- Centro storico. Walled old town on the Murge plateau, organized around the cathedral and the palazzo, with stone houses and the springs that gave the place its name.
How to get to Acquaviva delle Fonti
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 30 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the months the Murge stays mild and the countryside is in flower or harvest. July and August push toward thirty-five degrees on the plateau and the centro storico empties between two and five in the afternoon. The late-July onion sagra falls in the worst of the heat but still pulls a crowd.
Conversano
Why visit Conversano
Conversano sits on the first hills of the Murge plateau at 219 meters, twenty-five kilometers southeast of Bari and seven from the Adriatic. The Castello di Conversano was raised around 1054 by the Normans for defence and turned into a seigneurial residence by the Acquaviva d'Aragona counts, who ruled from 1455 until the early nineteenth century.
Inside the castle the Pinacoteca holds the ten-canvas cycle of episodes from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata painted by Paolo Domenico Finoglio in the 1640s, commissioned by Count Giangirolamo II d'Acquaviva. Opposite the castle stands the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, eleventh- and twelfth-century Apulian Romanesque with a sculpted portal, a rose window, and an interior Crucifix that anchors the patronal procession.
The former Monastero di San Benedetto, with a Romanesque cloister, was entrusted in 1266 by Pope Clement IV to Cistercian nuns exiled from Methoni in Greece, an arrangement so unusual it earned the monastery the medieval nickname Monstrum Apuliae, the Wonder of Puglia.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Conversano
- Castello di Conversano. Norman castle of 1054 turned seigneurial residence by the Acquaviva d'Aragona counts, with the Pinacoteca holding Finoglio's ten Gerusalemme Liberata canvases.
- Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Apulian Romanesque cathedral of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sculpted portal, rose window, wooden Crucifix venerated as the city's protector.
- Monastero di San Benedetto. Former Benedictine then Cistercian monastery with Romanesque cloister, called Monstrum Apuliae for the abbess-power of the Greek nuns entrusted to it from 1266.
How to get to Conversano
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 36 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the Murge months at this altitude: clear light, mild evenings, the cherry orchards in flower or fruit. Conversano is the centre of the IGP cherry zone and the late-May ciliegia harvest is the year's commercial peak. July and August hit thirty-five degrees and the centro storico empties in the afternoon.
Putignano
Why visit Putignano
The town sits on the Murgia, the karst plateau between Bari and Lecce, at 372 metres, home to just under 26,000 people. The carnival's origin is tied to a specific piece of geography: a Benedictine confraternity carried the relics of Santo Stefano inland from the coast at Monopoli to escape Saracen raids, arriving on 26 December 1394.
Farmers moving grapevines in the same December procession began singing satirical verses, and that song is what survives today as le Propaggini, still the opening event every 26 December. The carnival that grew from it ran across 631 years of plagues, wars, fascism, and pandemics without a break, which is the basis of its claim to being the oldest in Europe.
Inside the centro storico the old and the underground meet directly: a karst cave system opens beneath a Trullo-roofed building right in the middle of town, its entrance inside the old centre rather than out on the plateau, with stalactites and a section that served as a WWII refuge shelter. The Chiesa Madre di San Pietro Apostolo, a restored Romanesque church with a 16th-century crypt, anchors the same central piazza as the Palazzo del Balì, and stretches of the medieval walls still hold their line nearby.
The kitchen draws on the same plateau and its neighbours: focaccia barese, orecchiette con cime di rapa, capocollo from the next town over, Primitivo di Manduria carried in from 80 km south, and farinella, the sweet polenta cake made with grape must and chickpea flour that belongs specifically to the carnival calendar. What holds the town together is continuity: a religious procession that turned into satire and has not stopped since, a centre small enough that the cave, the church, and the workshops all sit within a short walk of each other, and a plateau setting that feeds both the table and the traffic passing through toward Alberobello and the Valle d'Itria.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Putignano
- Carnevale di Putignano (Dec 26 – Shrove Tuesday). Five Sunday float processions run from January to Shrove Tuesday. Le Propaggini opens the calendar on 26 December, the Funerale del Carnevale closes it, and 365 bells ring out, one for each day until the next.
- Cartapesta workshops + Museo del Carnevale. Many of the workshops are open for visits while the floats take shape. The museum documents the full run of carnival history, plague years, wars, and fascism included.
- Grotta del Trullo. The cave sits under a Trullo-roofed building in the old centre, which is where its name comes from. Guided visits take in the stalactites and the section that served as a WWII refuge shelter.
How to get to Putignano
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 46 minutes away by road.
Our tip
Putignano is dominated by Carnevale — January through Shrove Tuesday (typically late January to mid-February or early March depending on Easter date) is the headline season, with the five Sunday float processions drawing 200,000+ visitors per Sunday. Book accommodation 2-3 months ahead for Carnevale weekends. Outside that, the town is best March–June and September–October — summer is brutally hot on the Murgia (frequent 38°C+) and most cartapesta workshops close August. Carnevale di Putignano falls in February.
Gravina in Puglia
Why visit Gravina in Puglia
Gravina sits within the gravine, the network of limestone canyons cut across the Bari-Matera-Taranto karst plateau, the same geological system that produced Matera's Sassi 30 km west. This canyon is the deepest of them: 100m down, 350m wide at its narrowest, running straight through the centre of the modern town.
The plateau above holds the current population of 42,703; the old town clings to the cliff edge, its houses stacked against the same rock that the canyon walls below carry as a run of rupestrian churches and sanctuaries hollowed straight from the stone. The defining crossing of the two halves is the aqueduct bridge, built in the 18th century to bring water from the Murgia springs into the city and still walkable as a pedestrian route at 37m above the gorge floor.
On the canyon walls below it: a sanctuary carved into the rock, a church reached by a vertical stair and cut entirely into the cliff face, and a crypt complex holding frescoes from the 10th to 12th centuries, Byzantine work surviving in the dark of the rupestrian chambers. Above, on the plateau, the medieval centro takes over: the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, Romanesque and founded in 1092, holding its own Byzantine icon of the Madonna delle Grazie; the Castello Svevo rebuilt by Federico II; the Fondazione Ettore Pomarici Santomasi with its archaeological and Renaissance collections.
Gravina holds the Borghi più belli d'Italia designation together with Cittaslow, and lies on the Via Francigena, the branch tracing the old Via Appia route south, as well as bordering the Parco Nazionale dell'Alta Murgia, the karst plateau protected as national park immediately to the north. The food follows the same Murgia-Puglian line as the landscape: focaccia barese, orecchiette with cime di rapa, capocollo di Martina Franca, Primitivo di Manduria and the local Murgia DOC reds, built around the Festa di San Michele Arcangelo each September and the Carnevale Gravinese in late winter.
What Gravina adds up to is a town whose deepest cut in the earth doubles as its main street: canyon below carrying the sacred and the ancient, plateau above carrying the civic and the everyday, the two halves joined by a bridge built for water and now crossed for its own sake.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Gravina in Puglia
- Ponte Acquedotto (Bond's bridge). Crosses the gorge at 37m height on 18th-c stonework, a walkable pedestrian route today. This is the crossing James Bond takes by motorbike in the Matera chase sequence of No Time to Die.
- Chiesa di San Michele delle Grotte. A church carved entirely into the rock cliff of the gravina, reached by a vertical stair. The most striking of the canyon's rupestrian churches.
- Castello Svevo + Cattedrale. The castle sits on the plateau beside the Romanesque cathedral, founded 1092, which holds the Byzantine Madonna delle Grazie icon.
How to get to Gravina in Puglia
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 68 minutes away by road.
Our tip
Gravina in Puglia is best March–June and September–October — the Murgia summer is brutally hot (38°C+ inland) and the gorge becomes an oven. The Festa di San Michele Arcangelo 28-29 September is the year's headline. February-March brings the Carnevale Gravinese.
Matera
Why visit Matera
Matera sits at 401 meters on the edge of the Gravina ravine in eastern Basilicata, fifty-five kilometers inland from Bari. The Sassi, two districts of houses, churches and cisterns hollowed from tufa limestone, are among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on earth, with traces of human presence from the Paleolithic.
Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano dropped down the canyon walls; people lived there with their animals into the 1950s. Carlo Levi's 1945 book and the 1948 photographs that followed turned the Sassi into a national scandal, and a 1952 law moved twenty thousand residents to new housing on the plateau above.
The caves stayed empty for thirty years. UNESCO listed them in 1993.
Mel Gibson shot The Passion of the Christ here in 2004 and the city was European Capital of Culture in 2019; No Time to Die filmed in the Sassi in 2019, bringing twelve million euros into the local economy. Bread, ceramics, and rock churches across the Gravina anchor what is now Basilicata's only mass-tourism destination.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Matera
- Sassi di Matera. Two districts of cave dwellings, Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano, carved from tufa limestone and inhabited continuously from the Paleolithic until the 1950s evictions.
- Cattedrale della Madonna della Bruna e di Sant'Eustachio. Thirteenth-century Apulian Romanesque cathedral on the highest point of the Civita, between the two Sassi, with rose window and bell tower.
- Chiese rupestri del Parco della Murgia. More than 150 rock-cut churches scattered across the Gravina canyon, frescoed between the eighth and thirteenth centuries by Italo-Greek monks.
How to get to Matera
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 60 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September into October are the months Matera was built for. The light slants across the tufa façades in the late afternoon and turns the Sassi gold. July and August are punishing: temperatures cross thirty-five degrees and the canyon walls hold the heat past midnight, though hotels stay full because the Bond and Gibson tourism waves have not subsided.
Andria
Why visit Andria
Andria sits on the Murge plateau at 151 meters, ten kilometers from the Adriatic, the third-largest city in Puglia after Bari and Taranto. It was made a fortified civitas in 1046 under Peter the Norman, with twelve towers, three gates and a citadel; Frederick II raised it again in the thirteenth century and built his most famous castle on a hilltop eighteen kilometers south of the city walls.
The city and Castel del Monte read as two expressions of the same Frederician ambition, one a working civitas of towers and gates, the other a solitary geometric exercise on an open plateau with no town around it at all. The other claim Andria makes is burrata, invented around the early twentieth century by the Bianchino family as a way to use leftover mozzarella scraps.
A fortified city, an unfinished castle, and a cheese born from kitchen thrift: the Murge produced a walled seat of power and, separately, an object meant to be looked at rather than defended, and a food born of nothing more than not wanting to waste the scraps.
We confirmed you can reach this one by train.
What to see in Andria
- Castel del Monte. An octagonal prism with eight octagonal towers, standing alone on a Murge hilltop and visible for fifty kilometers in any direction. Never finished, never used for war.
- Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Romanesque cathedral founded in the twelfth century, rebuilt over the centuries, holds the crypt and the relics of San Riccardo, the city's patron.
- Chiesa di Sant'Agostino. Gothic-Romanesque church built by the Teutonic Knights in the late thirteenth century, with a sculpted portal that is one of the finest in Puglia.
How to get to Andria
There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bari is roughly 63 minutes away by road.
Our tip
April through June and September through October are the Murge months: clear light, mild evenings, the Castel del Monte plateau walkable without sweat. July and August hit thirty-six in the city and the castle exposed at 540 meters is brutal between noon and four. October is the olive harvest.
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