Hill towns
Hill towns in Puglia
20 towns
The ridge and hilltop borghi, sitting around 400 meters. Vineyards below, one road up, walkable once you are there. Good in almost any season.
The towns
San Giovanni Rotondo
Province: Foggia · 565 m
The Gargano town that became one of Italy's most visited pilgrimage sites, its skyline defined by a stone sanctuary large enough to seat 6,500.
Poggiorsini
Province: Bari · 461 m
The smallest commune in metropolitan Bari, an Orsini estate of 1609 that became an independent town only in 1957.
Pietramontecorvino
Province: Foggia · 456 m
A village at 456 meters on a tufa spur with a 30-meter Norman-Angevin tower and houses carved into the rock.
Biccari
Province: Foggia · 450 m
A Subappennino Dauno borgo at 450 meters under Monte Cornacchia, the highest peak in Puglia at 1,151 meters, with a Byzantine tower at its core.
Minervino Murge
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 445 m
A ridge town at 445 meters where the Murgia plateau breaks off into open view, inside the national park that carries its name.
Vico del Gargano
Province: Foggia · 445 m
A Gargano hill town at 445 meters where a Norman castle, a kiss alley, and DOP citrus terraces step down toward the Adriatic.
Martina Franca
Province: Taranto · 431 m
A Baroque and Rococo town on the Itria ridge at 431 meters, with an opera festival in its ducal courtyard since 1975.
Locorotondo
Province: Bari · 410 m
The round white town on the Itria valley ridge at 410 meters, with cummerse roofs the rest of Puglia does not have.
Alberobello
Province: Bari · 402 m
The Itria valley town built entirely of trulli, 1,500 corbelled limestone cones in two quarters, UNESCO since 1996.
Cisternino
Province: Brindisi · 394 m
An Itria valley borgo on the southern Murgia at 394 meters, whitewashed and looking down over drystone walls and trulli.
Putignano
Province: Bari · 372 m
Putignano has run its carnival continuously since 1394, the longest unbroken run in Europe, staged in a Murgia town with a karst cave threaded beneath its own centro storico.
Gravina in Puglia
Province: Bari · 350 m
A Bari-province town of 42,700 built on the lip of a 100m-deep limestone canyon, its cliffs threaded with rupestrian cave churches.
Cassano delle Murge
Province: Bari · 341 m
A Murge foothills town at 341 meters at the gate of the Alta Murgia park, with the 1,300-hectare Foresta Mercadante mostly inside its territory.
Acquaviva delle Fonti
Province: Bari · 300 m
A Murge town at 300 meters between Bari and the Itria valley, named for its springs and a DOP red onion.
Castellana Grotte
Province: Bari · 290 m
A Murge town beside the cave system it is named for, three kilometers of galleries running 60 meters under the limestone plateau.
Sammichele di Bari
Province: Bari · 280 m
A Murge town at 280 meters founded in 1609, anchored by the Caracciolo castle and famous for the zampina pork sausage.
Castellaneta
Province: Taranto · 235 m
A cliff-edge Murge town at 235 meters above the Gravina Grande canyon, birthplace of Rudolph Valentino in 1895, with a Bandiera Blu Ionian marina.
Casamassima
Province: Bari · 230 m
The blue town of the Murge, twenty kilometers south of Bari, its centro storico painted with copper-blue lime after the 1658 plague spared its residents.
Conversano
Province: Bari · 219 m
A pre-Murge hill town at 219 meters, three centuries seat of the Acquaviva counts, with the abbey-monastery once called the Wonder of Puglia.
Ostuni
Province: Brindisi · 218 m
The Città Bianca on three hills at 218 meters, eight kilometers inland, whitewashed against the Murge above an Adriatic plain of olive trees.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns
Castelvecchio Subequo
Province: L'Aquila
At 409 meters in the Subequana valley, the Roman Superaequum and Franciscan station where the saint himself was given land for a convent built between 1221 and 1261.
Domodossola
Province: Verbano-Cusio-Ossola
The Ossola capital at 272 meters at the foot of the Simplon Pass.
Caldes
Province: Trento
A scattered commune on the Noce, six hamlets gathered around a thirteenth-century tower-house castle that once belonged to the Thun family.
Mamoiada
Province: Nuoro
The Barbagia village where the Mamuthones come out on January 17, twelve men in black sheepskins carrying thirty kilos of cowbells.
San Giuliano Terme
Province: Pisa
A thermal spa ten kilometers from Pisa, where the springs were bathed since the Romans called them Aquae Pisanae.