The 7 best towns worth staying overnight that you can reach by train within 90 minutes of Taranto

Bernalda

Why visit Bernalda

Bernalda sits at 127 meters between the Bradano and Basento rivers, eight kilometers inland from the Ionian coast and the frazione of Metaponto. Almost twelve thousand people live in the town, named for the Aragonese courtier who moved the older Camarda settlement up to the defensible hilltop where the centro still stands.

The corso and the castle anchor the upper town; the coast and its archaeological ground lie a separate world eight kilometers below. Metaponto was founded by Achaean Greeks in the seventh century BC, the plain later home to Pythagoras until his death.

What remains there today spans a wide stretch of time in a small area: temple columns from the sixth century BC, a Greek theater and necropolis, and a beach that draws summer crowds for reasons that have nothing to do with antiquity. Inland, the hill town's own history turns on a single family: an emigration in 1904 and a return a century later that reopened one of its noble houses to visitors.

The town works, then, as two places joined by eight kilometers, one built on Magna Graecia and modern seaside tourism, the other on a hilltop refounding and one family's long departure and return.

What to see in Bernalda

• Castello Aragonese. Hilltop fortress dating to the 1470 refounding by Bernardino de Bernaudo, with medieval origins and Norman, Swabian and Angevin layered additions.
• Palazzo Margherita. Noble palazzo on Corso Umberto, now a nine-room hotel, the family returning most years for the town's patronal feast.
• Tavole Palatine. The columns stand alone on open plain outside Metaponto, no temple walls around them, the ground where Pythagoras founded his school and died.

How to get to Bernalda

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 51 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

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Locorotondo

Why visit Locorotondo

Locorotondo sits on a natural terrace at 410 meters, the high edge of the Valle d'Itria looking south over the trulli countryside between Alberobello, Cisternino and Martina Franca. The name means round place: the centro storico is a perfect circle of whitewashed houses, and the architecture is unique to this town.

The cummerse are stone houses with steep pitched roofs covered in two thin layers of limestone slabs, a profile that exists nowhere else in Puglia. The streets between them run in concentric arcs and are narrow enough to lose the sun by mid-afternoon.

Both the Borghi più belli d'Italia and the Touring Club's Bandiera Arancione recognize the place. The town also makes a white DOC wine from Verdeca and Bianco d'Alessano grapes, grown on 1,650 hectares of vineyards across the surrounding plateau, plus a Città dell'Olio membership for the oil that comes off the same hills.

What to see in Locorotondo

• Centro storico. Circular old town of whitewashed cummerse, an architectural type with double-pitch limestone-slab roofs found only here.
• Villa Garibaldi. Public garden on the ridge with the widest panoramic view over the Itria valley and its trulli countryside.
• Chiesa Madre di San Giorgio. Eighteenth-century parish church on the highest point of the historic center, with a neoclassical façade and a tall central nave.

How to get to Locorotondo

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 48 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

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Oria

Why visit Oria

Oria sits at 166 meters on a Salento ridge between Taranto and Brindisi, north of Manduria and southeast of the ancient Taras. The town was Hyria, one of the principal Messapian cities, before the Romans absorbed the region.

Frederick II rebuilt the castle on the Messapian acropolis between 1227 and 1233; the triangular plan he chose is unique in southern Italian military architecture, with three towers, the Quadrata (Frederician), the Del Cavaliere and the Del Salto (both Angevin additions). Oria also held one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, a study center where philosophy, the Talmud, Greek, Latin, medicine and natural science were taught from the ninth century.

Shefatya ben Amitai and Shabbethai Donnolo, two of the first Hebrew writers native to Europe, both lived and worked here. The Jewish quarter, the Giudecca, still organizes the southern edge of the centro storico.

What to see in Oria

• Castello Svevo di Federico II. Frederician castle of 1227-1233 on the Messapian acropolis, triangular plan with three towers, one Frederician and two Angevin, the town's defining monument.
• Cattedrale di Oria. Eighteenth-century Baroque cathedral raised over earlier medieval foundations, the seat of the diocese of Oria since the Lombard era.
• Giudecca. Old Jewish quarter on the southern flank of the centro storico, organized around the Vico degli Ebrei, a continuous medieval settlement from the ninth century.

How to get to Oria

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 46 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

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Pisticci

Why visit Pisticci

Pisticci sits on three eroded clay hills in the southern Matera province and is the most populous town in the province after Matera itself. The name of the coastal frazione, and the geology under the whole town, are the same clay that failed on 9 February 1688, when a landslide cut the settlement in half and killed four hundred people.

Rather than move down to the valley, survivors rebuilt directly on the ground the slide had crossed, in two-room houses with pitched red tile roofs, arranged in straight lines instead of the tangled layout typical of hill towns in the region. That district took the name of the cliff itself.

Above it, on the highest point, the older part of the town kept its Norman tower, its medieval gate and its mother church, the built record of what stood before the collapse. Twenty kilometers away on the plain toward the sea, the hamlet of Marconia, named for Guglielmo Marconi, functions as the modern center, while the coastal frazione handles the town's relationship to the Ionian.

The clay hills inland, meanwhile, are worked for truffles rather than housing. What the layout adds up to is a town split by elevation and by function: the old hill preserves what predates the disaster, the rebuilt district records the disaster itself, and the plain and the coast carry everything the eroding hill cannot.

What to see in Pisticci

• Rione Dirupo. Low houses set two rooms wide under pitched red tile roofs, laid out in straight lines rather than the tangled streets typical of the region, the most lived-in district of the town today.
• Terravecchia. Oldest district on the highest hill, with the square tower of the Norman castle, the medieval gate, the mother church and the noble palazzi that survived from before 1688.
• Marina di Pisticci. Coastal frazione on the Ionian, twenty kilometers from the centro storico, a Bandiera Blu beach with pine forest backing the sand.

How to get to Pisticci

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 1 h 6 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

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Ostuni

Why visit Ostuni

Ostuni sits at 218 meters on three hills above the Adriatic coastal plain, eight kilometers inland in the southeastern Murge. The whitewashing that gives it the name Città Bianca is medieval in origin, a hygienic measure against plague that survived as the local building convention; the entire centro storico is painted white in lime every spring and reads as a single bright mass from the surrounding olive country.

The territory has been inhabited since the Paleolithic; the Messapii founded the urban nucleus before the Romans absorbed the region. In 1507 it passed to Isabella, Duchess of Bari, then to her daughter Bona Sforza, queen of Poland, who fortified the coast with watchtowers against Ottoman raids in 1539.

The Cattedrale, a late-Gothic facade with a rose window of twenty-four rays, anchors the upper town. The olive landscape around the commune holds some of the oldest cultivated trees in the Mediterranean.

What to see in Ostuni

• Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta. Late fifteenth-century Gothic cathedral at the highest point of the centro storico, with a rose window of twenty-four rays unique in Puglia.
• Centro storico. Whitewashed old town on three hills, lime-painted every spring against plague tradition, the single bright mass that names the Città Bianca.
• Piazza della Libertà. Lower civic square outside the medieval walls, with the Guglia di Sant'Oronzo, an early eighteenth-century baroque obelisk to the patron saint.

How to get to Ostuni

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 1 h 4 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

Everything we know about Ostuni

Nardò

Why visit Nardò

The town sits at 45 meters in the northwestern Salento, about ten kilometers inland from the Ionian coast. With just under 31,000 inhabitants and 190 square kilometers of territory, it is the second-largest commune in the province after the capital.

It was a Byzantine stronghold for centuries; in 1497 the dukes of Acquaviva acquired it and turned it into a cultural seat, with universities, academies and literary circles that drew on the same humanist current as Lecce and Gallipoli. The centro storico, built up under that ducal patronage, forms a dense fabric of palaces and church facades in the local pietra leccese, with the castle standing at its edge, now serving as the municipal seat.

Ten kilometers of inland distance separate that historic core from the municipal coastline, where the Porto Selvaggio nature reserve occupies a stretch of Mediterranean pine forest above limestone cliffs, held by the commune as a regional park. Inland seat of government and culture, coastal reserve of forest and cliff: the two halves of the commune's territory answer to different centuries and different purposes, joined only by the ten kilometers between them.

What to see in Nardò

• Piazza Salandra. Central Baroque square of the centro storico, the Guglia dell'Immacolata at its center, ringed by palazzi and church facades in pietra leccese.
• Castello Acquaviva. Aragonese-Acquaviva castle on the edge of the centro storico, residence of the ducal house from 1497, now the municipal seat.
• Cattedrale di Maria Santissima Assunta. Romanesque-Baroque cathedral founded in the eleventh century and remodelled across the seventeenth, with later Baroque facade and bell tower.

How to get to Nardò

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 1 h 20 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

Everything we know about Nardò

Martina Franca

Why visit Martina Franca

Martina Franca sits at 431 meters on the southern edge of the Valle d'Itria, on the border between the provinces of Taranto, Bari and Brindisi. The town was founded in 1310 by Philip I of Anjou, Prince of Taranto, who granted franchigie, tax exemptions, to settlers willing to repopulate the hill, hence Franca in the name.

The centro storico is the densest concentration of Rococo and late-Baroque architecture in Puglia after Lecce: wrought-iron balconies, carved stone portals, churches built or rebuilt after the 1743 earthquake. The Palazzo Ducale of 1668, raised on the foundations of a 1338 medieval castle, is the seat of the municipal offices and the open-air courtyard where the Festival della Valle d'Itria has been performed every July and August since 1975, founded specifically to recover rare and forgotten operas.

The Basilica di San Martino, begun in 1747, is the most complete example of Martinese Rococo. The surrounding plateau makes a Martina Franca DOC white wine and a strong dry-cured capocollo IGP.

What to see in Martina Franca

• Palazzo Ducale. Built in 1668 on the foundations of a 1338 medieval castle, town hall and home of the Festival della Valle d'Itria summer opera courtyard.
• Basilica di San Martino. Eighteenth-century basilica begun in 1747 after the 1743 earthquake, the most complete Martinese Rococo monument and museum of liturgical art.
• Piazza Roma and Piazza Maria Immacolata. The two main squares of the centro storico, linked by Via Cavour, lined with eighteenth-century palazzi and the town's main passeggiata.

How to get to Martina Franca

It has its own railway station. Taranto is about 38 min away by road. The full route from Bari.

Everything we know about Martina Franca