Puglia

For Easter break I decided to fulfill a long-held dream: travel all the way down the boot of Italy to Puglia. It's a sun-bleached region surrounded by breathtakingly blue waters, former home to Greeks, Romans, Goths, Lombards, and Byzantines, with fields of olive groves and wild flowers, steeped in tradition and poverty and folk music, la pizzica e la tarantella, the dances of love and death. Of course I wanted to go. We spent 6 days and 7 nights, beginning our stay in Lecce, moving to the coast at Gallipoli, stopping in the countryside for a wonderful Easter lunch with sort-of distant cousins (you can find family anywhere, really), and returning to Lecce for Pasquetta, the day after Easter.

There's a lot to write about with Puglia, and I'm not sure I can do it justice. But I felt like I was having a great adventure there, that I was truly someplace different. The salty air, il sole che picchia, the colors of the countryside and of the people, seduced me, enchanted me, and I was very sorry to leave. So to indulge my nostalgia and to sort through some of the 400 digital pictures we took, I give you a few entries on this lovely and complicated region.