Road Trip: Puglia

For the last five or so years, my mom has been researching our Italian lineage as part of the process to prove  jure sanguinis—the right to citizenship by direct bloodline. Having Italian citizenship means we can live and work anywhere in the EU, travel freely with no limit on stays in the EU and make the most of many other benefits. She’s combed through hundreds of posts in the “Dual U.S.-Italian Citizenship” Facebook pages and has woken up at ridiculous hours to try and book an impossible-to-get appointment at the consulate. We finally hired a lawyer from  Italian Citizenship Assistance  after learning that we qualified as a special “1948 Case.” (Prior to 1948, when the Italian Constitution granted women civil rights, women could not transfer citizenship to their children  jure sanguinis. A 1948 Case allows you to claim Italian citizenship through a female ancestor.) After years of waiting, our court case was finally approved earlier this year, and to celebrate we decided to plan a trip to Puglia, where one side of our Italian family had immigrated from. Though we didn’t have plans to drive around looking for distant cousins à la White Lotus, it still felt like a special sort of homecoming to see their last name, Fanelli, on plenty of tiny trattorias, and to recognize the family recipes we grew up eating on most menus. 

My mom, aunt, sister and I all took the red eye from JFK to FCO and had just enough time for an espresso in the airport before catching our next flight to Bari, the capital of Puglia and the starting point of our road trip. Our first stop for a few nights was Alberobello—one of the famous whitewashed towns in the Valle d’Itria made up almost entirely of  trulli  (hive-shaped stone houses), which felt straight out of a fairytale. We had rented a villa just outside of the town center for five nights so we could take day trips from there. There’s no shortage of beautiful rental properties and Masserias where you can stay in this area (more on those in our  Southern Italy Travel Planner)—just make sure there is a real person on the ground who can help if you have plumbing or electrical issues like we did! We rented through Plum Guides and our trulli home was beautiful, but because of its age had quite a few issues, and we ended up losing power and running water for two days. Of course, this was just our experience at one property, but neither our host nor their corporate office were very helpful. Next time, we will book with the  Thinking Traveller, which specializes in this region. Our friend and Yolo partnerships director, Rula Al Amad, just finished meticulously renovating her stunning  Masseria Donnagnora  and told us how thoroughly the Thinking Traveller team vetted her property before adding it to their platform. 

For our first night, we booked dinner at farm-to-table restaurant  Terra Madre, and sat just a few feet from the garden where they harvested the produce for our meal. The service and food were excellent, so we stocked up on wine and snacks from their small store and were shocked when the bill for dinner (for 4 people!) plus everything else came to only 130 euro. Throughout our trip, we found that even though Puglia has grown in popularity in recent years, it is still quite affordable. 

The rest of our days in this area were loosely planned—we would wake up and pick fresh cherries from the trees in our yard for breakfast as we decided on the day’s activities. One day we spent a few hours meandering through the incredibly photogenic beach town of Polignano a Mare, before heading to  Cala Maka beach club  for lunch and an invigorating cold plunge in the ocean to stave off jet lag. Another day, in between visits to Locorotondo and Martina Franca, we booked a vineyard tour and wine tasting at  I Pastini, which produces the typical primitivo wine of the region. A drive in any direction took us past endless fields of olive trees, so when we stumbled upon the  Masseria Brancati  on our way to Ostuni and saw they offered tours of their olive grove, we were eager to join one. Their property has beautifully gnarled trees with thick trunks that look like abstract sculptures, some of which are 3,000 years old! One of the oldest Masserias in the area, they have been producing oil on this site since the Middle Ages.

Speaking of which, our next stop was Matera, the oldest city in Italy, which has been continually inhabited since paleolithic times. But first, we stopped in Cassano delle Murge to look for the birth certificate of a relative who was a missing link in my mom’s research. We had been able to prove  jure sanguinis  through another relative and didn’t need this record for our case, but we were in the area and it was so satisfying after years of searching for specific records online and in the US to just walk right into the City Hall of the commune where our family lived some 150 years ago and to have a handsome Italian official find what we were looking for in a massive leather-bound book! 

We spent two nights in Matera, which is a city made up entirely of  sassi, or cave dwellings carved right out of the earth. Matera has a fascinating history, which we learned so much about during  an excellent tour  with a charming man named Gaetano from the next town over. Gaetano seemed to know everyone, and over the course of three hours stopped to engage with several Materans going about their day, as if the whole tour was a wildly orchestrated play and they were the actors. Despite its somewhat tragic history, at night the city was buzzing with well-heeled Italians enjoying a  passeggiata, popping into small galleries and listening to live music in the cobblestone streets. If you visit Matera, you can’t miss  I Vizi Degli Angeli, where I had potentially the best gelato of my life (I am a pistachio loyalist) and the chance to sleep in a sassi. We stayed in a beautiful cave room at  Sassisuites, which was lovely, but after two nights the damp cave air was starting to get to us. That said, it is definitely worth it to spend a night to feel the energy of the city and take the most amazing candlelit bath in a stone cave with real fossils embedded in the rock. 

From Matera, we dropped my sister and aunt off in Bari and my mom and I headed south towards Salento. While the photogenic masserias and olive oil fields of northern Puglia have probably graced your Instagram feed at some point in the last few years, the region’s southern counterpart, Salento, has still remained largely under the radar. In Salento, the beaches are full of fabulously unselfconscious nonnas bronzing in bikinis, and each town square seemed to have a small group of old men flip-flopping between passionate arguments and eruptions of laughter within the same puff of a cigarette.

On our way south, we spent one night at the quaint  Hotel Piccolo Mondo, which felt straight out of our  Costa Meno  fantasy. A few kilometers down the road in the quiet hamlet of Marittima, we stopped at the impeccably curated  Tulsi shop, where British expat Deborah Nolan greeted us in an ethereal kaftan and a bold red lip. Deborah opened Tulsi 15 years ago and has since expanded to a few locations throughout Puglia. Despite the town’s sleepiness, the store was full of chic women from New York, London and California ogling basket-bags and textiles collected from Deborah’s travels. We picked out a few souvenirs and zipped down the road towards our final stop,  Palazzo Daniele, which I have been eager to check out since it opened in April 2019. 

If you weren’t looking for it, you could drive right past  Palazzo Daniele, located in the center of Gagliano del Capo, the very southernmost tip of Italy’s heel. The palazzo’s exterior blends right into the architecture of its surroundings, with an entrance marked only by a massive blue door. Once inside, Fabio led us to our suite, one of nine total, just off the open air courtyard that smelled of fresh jasmine. He pointed out some of the features of the Palazzo originally built in 1861 and insisted we make ourselves at home. A palazzo full of original frescoes, intricate mosaic flooring and contemporary art might sound like it could lean stuffy, but nothing here felt uptight or off-limits. We were encouraged to hang out in the kitchen, lounge beneath their orange trees, or help ourselves to a drink from the honor bar featuring a neon sign that cheekily read “holy spirits.” 

And the food, my god the food! I have never seen my mom admit anyone’s meatballs were better than my grandmother’s—holidays at our house often consist of my mom and her siblings lovingly bickering about how to  really  make their family recipes the right way—so when she whipped out Google Translate at the dinner table to tell Sonia, the sweetest chef at Palazzo Daniele, that these were the best she’s ever had, I was floored. Sonia insisted on giving my mom an impromptu meatball lesson on the spot and their recipes were almost identical (though Sonia’s secret is to soak the breadcrumbs in milk first). Sonia insisted that this wasn’t her job, it was her passion. Each person we encountered was just as warm, interesting, and full of stories to share. On our last night as we hugged Sonia goodbye, we saw other guests checking out exchanging hugs and Instagram accounts with the team that took such great care of them, too.