Without a car
Apulia by train
41 towns
Towns in this region where we confirmed an active station. Check the timetable before you go: a station on the map is not the same as a useful service.

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.

Alberobello
Province: Bari · 402 m
The Itria valley town built entirely of trulli, 1,500 corbelled limestone cones in two quarters, UNESCO since 1996.

Andria
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 151 m
Frederick II's favourite Apulian city, the birthplace of burrata, ruling the Murge plateau eighteen kilometers north of its most famous castle.

Bisceglie
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 16 m
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 · 646 m
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 · 47 m
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 · 161 m
An upper Salento hill town between Brindisi and Ostuni, with a marine reserve on its coast.

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.

Castellana Grotte
Province: Bari · 290 m
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 · 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.

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.

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.

Copertino
Province: Lecce · 34 m
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 · 95 m
A Griko-speaking town twenty-five kilometers south of Lecce, built around a 1500s Lecce-stone castle of circular towers around a quadrangular plan.

Fasano
Province: Brindisi · 118 m
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 · 78 m
The Salento town at 78 meters where the cult of San Paolo bred tarantism and gave the pizzica its origin myth.

Galatone
Province: Lecce · 57 m
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 · 12 m
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 · 7 m
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 · 78 m
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 · 350 m
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.

Lecce
Province: Lecce · 49 m
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 · 410 m
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 · 79 m
The Messapian capital thirty-five kilometers east of Taranto, ringed by three concentric stone walls and the home of Primitivo.

Martina Franca
Province: Taranto · 431 m
Puglia's second Baroque city after Lecce, on the Itria ridge at 431 meters, with an opera festival in its ducal courtyard since 1975.

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.

Monopoli
Province: Bari · 9 m
An Adriatic walled town forty kilometers south of Bari, the Charles V castle on the headland, 156 square kilometers of coastline behind it.

Nardò
Province: Lecce · 45 m
The second city of Salento after Lecce, a Baroque inland capital twenty-five kilometers from Lecce with a Ionian coastline behind it.

Oria
Province: Brindisi · 166 m
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 · 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.

Otranto
Province: Lecce · 20 m
Italy's easternmost city, eighty kilometers from Albania, with a Norman mosaic floor and the bones of 813 martyrs in the cathedral.

Polignano a Mare
Province: Bari · 24 m
The Adriatic cliff town thirty kilometers south of Bari, built on a twenty-metre limestone bluff, birthplace of Domenico Modugno.

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.

Rodi Garganico
Province: Foggia · 42 m
A Gargano promontory town above the Adriatic, citrus capital of the peninsula, with DOP oranges and lemons grown on the terraces below it.

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.

San Severo
Province: Foggia · 86 m
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 · 130 m
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 · 7 m
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 · 5 m
A Tavoliere town between the Saline di Margherita and the Ofanto, sitting on a Bronze Age sanctuary that still surprises archaeologists.

Ugento
Province: Lecce · 108 m
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.

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.
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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.
