Region
Apulia
Apulia's 59 towns in our catalogue split across the Lecce, Foggia, and Bari provinces; 23 carry the Borghi Autentici designation.
59 towns · highest: Monte Sant'Angelo 843m · smallest: Celle di San Vito 148 people
59 of 59 towns
59 of 59 towns
Acquaviva delle Fonti
Province: Bari
A Murge town at 300 meters between Bari and the Itria valley, named for its springs and a DOP red onion.
Alberobello
Province: Bari
The Itria valley town built entirely of trulli, 1,500 corbelled limestone cones in two quarters, UNESCO since 1996.
Andria
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani
Frederick II's favourite Apulian city, the birthplace of burrata, ruling the Murge plateau eighteen kilometers north of its most famous castle.
Biccari
Province: Foggia
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.
Bisceglie
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani
An Adriatic port town between Trani and Molfetta, named for Roman watchtowers, with five dolmens around it and a Norman cathedral begun in 1073.
Bovino
Province: Foggia
A Daunian Mountains hill town at 646 meters above the Cervaro valley, Roman Vibinum, with a Norman-Swabian castle later turned into a Guevara ducal palace.
Campi Salentina
Province: Lecce
A Salento plain town fifteen kilometers north of Lecce, rebuilt after the Saracen raids of 926 and later raised to a marquisate.
Carovigno
Province: Brindisi
An upper Salento hill town between Brindisi and Ostuni, with a marine reserve on its coast.
Casamassima
Province: Bari
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.
Cassano delle Murge
Province: Bari
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.
Castellana Grotte
Province: Bari
A Murge town built on top of the cave system it is named for, three kilometers of galleries running 60 meters under the limestone plateau.
Castellaneta
Province: Taranto
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.
Celle di San Vito
Province: Foggia
The smallest commune in Puglia, 148 residents at 726 meters, one of two Franco-Provençal-speaking villages in the south.
Cisternino
Province: Brindisi
An Itria valley borgo on the southern Murgia at 394 meters, whitewashed and looking down over drystone walls and trulli.
Conversano
Province: Bari
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.
Copertino
Province: Lecce
A Salento town fifteen kilometers west of Lecce, with one of Puglia's largest Renaissance fortresses and the birthplace of Saint Joseph of Copertino.
Corigliano d'Otranto
Province: Lecce
A Griko-speaking town twenty-five kilometers south of Lecce, built around a 1500s Lecce-stone castle of circular towers around a quadrangular plan.
Faeto
Province: Foggia
The highest village in Puglia, Franco-Provençal-speaking since 1266.
Fasano
Province: Brindisi
A Brindisi-province town running from the Adriatic up to the Itria escarpment, holding a Roman coastal city, a wooded highpoint, and Europe's second-largest safari park.
Galatina
Province: Lecce
The Salento town at 78 meters where the cult of San Paolo bred tarantism and gave the pizzica its origin myth.
Galatone
Province: Lecce
A Salento town at 57 meters thirteen kilometers from Gallipoli, built around a Baroque sanctuary raised over a fourteenth-century Byzantine icon.
Gallipoli
Province: Lecce
The Ionian beach city on a limestone island, Greek Kallipolis meaning beautiful city, tied to the mainland by a seventeenth-century bridge.
Giovinazzo
Province: Bari
An Adriatic fishing port twenty kilometers northwest of Bari, with a Norman cathedral and a Bronze Age dolmen in the agro inland.
Giurdignano
Province: Lecce
A two-thousand-resident Salento borgo at 78 meters known as the megalithic garden of Italy, with nineteen menhirs and a cluster of dolmens.
Gravina in Puglia
Province: Bari
Puglia's deepest gravina: a Bari-province town of 42,700 built on the lip of a 100m-deep limestone canyon, its cliffs threaded with rupestrian cave churches.
Isole Tremiti
Province: Foggia
An Adriatic archipelago of five islands twenty-two kilometers off the Gargano, the only Italian commune scattered across an open-sea group.
Lecce
Province: Lecce
The Baroque capital of the Salento, ninety-four thousand people on the Lecce-stone plain, carving its façades in honey limestone since 1500.
Locorotondo
Province: Bari
The round white town on the Itria valley ridge at 410 meters, with cummerse roofs the rest of Puglia does not have.
Manduria
Province: Taranto
The Messapian capital thirty-five kilometers east of Taranto, ringed by three concentric stone walls and the home of Primitivo.
Martano
Province: Lecce
The biggest town in the area, twenty kilometers south of Lecce, where the Griko language still survives among older residents.
Martina Franca
Province: Taranto
Puglia's second Baroque city after Lecce, on the Itria ridge at 431 meters, with an opera festival in its ducal courtyard since 1975.
Maruggio
Province: Taranto
A fortified Borghi più Belli borgo on a low Ionian hill in Taranto province, built around a Knights of Malta commanderie that ran the Order's southern Italian affairs for six centuries.
Mattinata
Province: Foggia
The only Apulian town that faces south on the Adriatic, the white amphitheater of the eastern Gargano beneath Monte Sacro.
Melendugno
Province: Lecce
Salento's archaeological-beach comune: 17 km of Adriatic coast in Lecce province combining karst pools, Bronze-Age-to-Messapian ruins, and a run of blue-flagged sand.
Minervino Murge
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani
A ridge town at 445 meters where the Murgia plateau breaks off into open view, inside the national park that carries its name.
Monopoli
Province: Bari
An Adriatic walled town forty kilometers south of Bari, the Charles V castle on the headland, 156 square kilometers of coastline behind it.
Monte Sant'Angelo
Province: Foggia
The Gargano peak at 843 meters, the oldest western shrine to an archangel, UNESCO since 2011.
Nardò
Province: Lecce
The second city of Salento after Lecce, a Baroque inland capital twenty-five kilometers from Lecce with a Ionian coastline behind it.
Nociglia
Province: Lecce
A small Salento interior village forty kilometers south of Lecce, a fourteenth-century baronial castle and a Bosco Belvedere that gave the place its name.
Oria
Province: Brindisi
A Messapian acropolis between Taranto and Brindisi crowned by Frederick II's triangular castle, home to one of medieval Europe's oldest Jewish communities.
Ostuni
Province: Brindisi
The Città Bianca on three hills at 218 meters, eight kilometers inland, whitewashed against the Murge above an Adriatic plain of olive trees.
Otranto
Province: Lecce
Italy's easternmost city, eighty kilometers from Albania, with a Norman mosaic floor and the bones of 813 martyrs in the cathedral.
Peschici
Province: Foggia
A Gargano cliff-top village above the Adriatic, white houses spilling toward the sea and trabucchi on the headlands.
Pietramontecorvino
Province: Foggia
A village at 456 meters on a tufa spur with a 30-meter Norman-Angevin tower and houses carved into the rock.
Poggiorsini
Province: Bari
The smallest commune in metropolitan Bari, an Orsini estate of 1609 that became an independent town only in 1957.
Polignano a Mare
Province: Bari
The Adriatic cliff town thirty kilometers south of Bari, built on a twenty-metre limestone bluff, birthplace of Domenico Modugno.
Putignano
Province: Bari
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.
Rodi Garganico
Province: Foggia
A Gargano promontory town above the Adriatic, citrus capital of the peninsula, with DOP oranges and lemons grown on the terraces below it.
Roseto Valfortore
Province: Foggia
A Daunian Mountain stone village at 658 meters near the Fortore springs, named for the wild roses and known for black and white truffles.
Sammichele di Bari
Province: Bari
A Murge town at 280 meters founded in 1609, anchored by the Caracciolo castle and famous for the zampina pork sausage.
San Giovanni Rotondo
Province: Foggia
The Gargano town that became Italy's second pilgrimage site after Assisi, its skyline defined by a stone sanctuary large enough to seat 6,500.
San Severo
Province: Foggia
The Daunia wine capital on the Tavoliere, home to Puglia's first DOC of 1968 and a Carnevale of fanoia explosions known across the south.
Specchia
Province: Lecce
A medieval Salento borgo on the Serra Magnone at 130 meters, named for the Messapian stone lookouts that once watched the coast.
Trani
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani
The Adriatic port whose pink-white Romanesque cathedral stands on the water, built for a Greek pilgrim who died here in 1094.
Trinitapoli
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani
A Tavoliere town between the Saline di Margherita and the Ofanto, sitting on a Bronze Age sanctuary that still surprises archaeologists.
Ugento
Province: Lecce
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Vernole
Province: Lecce
A Salento commune ten kilometers from Lecce whose frazione of Acaya is the only Renaissance fortified town in southern Italy.
Vico del Gargano
Province: Foggia
A Gargano hill town at 445 meters where a Norman castle, a kiss alley, and DOP citrus terraces step down toward the Adriatic.
Vieste
Province: Foggia
The Gargano headland of whitewashed alleys on a white limestone cliff, with the Pizzomunno sea stack standing 26 meters offshore.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Cicala
Province: Catanzaro
A village of 887 people at 829 meters, founded in 1616 by farmers asking for land.
Fossombrone
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
An inland Marchigiano town on the Metauro river, layered over a Roman colony with a Renaissance ducal court rising above it.
Bagnoli del Trigno
Province: Isernia
The 'Pearl of Molise', a 637-resident borgo built into and around a massive limestone outcrop above the Trigno valley, with a medieval castle rebuilt on its summit.
Varenna
Province: Lecco
A fishing village founded in 769 on the Lecco arm of Lake Como, with a steep grid of streets falling into the water.
Rocca di Botte
Province: L'Aquila
At 750 meters on the Carseolani slopes between Abruzzo and Lazio, the birthplace of an eleventh-century hermit and a fief of the Colonna.