A Summer Road Trip Through Puglia

Since moving to Italy three years ago, we’ve always spent part of our summer in and around the town of Putignano, about 45 minutes from Bari in Puglia, where Andre’s father was born and spent the early years of his childhood before moving to New York City. We still have a lot of extended family who live in town, so it’s been such a wonderful way for our family, and especially our boys, to connect with their Italian relatives and spend time in the place where their grandfather grew up.

This year, because it was so hot in Rome, we decided to turn our annual trip to Putignano into a longer road trip, heading farther south to explore the Salento region for a week before making our way north to Fasano to stay at our friends’ masseria, and then finally landing in Putignano to meet the family. We’ve been wanting to explore this wilder part of Puglia, with its beautiful rocky coastline and beaches, for a while now, so it felt like the perfect opportunity. We found a small, very reasonably priced hotel called Est Hotel in the coastal town of Santa Cesarea Terme, which had just opened a brand new pool the week we arrived. They also gave us a large family room, which is so hard to come by in Italy, allowing all five of us to stay together in one hotel room. The hotel was simple and clean, with a great breakfast each morning. Definitely an easy place for a family to stay.

Santa Cesarea Terme is a small seaside town on Puglia’s Adriatic coast, known for its dramatic rocky coastline, crystal clear water, and natural thermal springs. It was filled mostly with locals and Italian tourists, and we saw very few Americans, if any. We spent most of our days swimming in the hotel pool after a great day at Bagno Marino Archi, a beach club just a five minute walk away. We hadn’t planned ahead and didn’t have a reservation, which next time we definitely will, so every morning we arrived at the bagno at 8:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before they opened, to be first in line to get chairs and an umbrella for the day. If you don’t have a reservation, it’s essential to get there early, as the chairs fill up quickly and there are very few available for walk-ins, especially in August. This bagno is really special, built directly into the rocky coastline and tucked into a small cove surrounded by dramatic cliffs. There isn’t really a beach, but rather platforms lined with chairs and umbrellas and little ladders that take you straight into the gorgeous sea. They also have a bar, restaurant, and pizzeria with really great pizza, so you can easily settle in and spend the entire day swimming, sunbathing, eating, and doing very little else, which is exactly what we did.

There aren’t many other places to eat in town outside of a few casual spots selling piadine and puccia sandwiches, so we ate most of our meals at the bagno. We did venture to the seaside town of Tricase, about a 25 minute drive from Santa Cesarea, for dinner one night at a small seafood restaurant with a seasonal menu called Anime Sante. A few days later, we went back to Tricase, starting off the morning with some fantastic artisanal gelato from Gelateria G. & Co., followed by a delicious seafood lunch at Taverna del Porto. After a lunch of raw oysters and seafood pasta, we walked down the road to a bar in Tricase Porto called Menamé, where they play great music and serve coffee, cocktails, panzerotti, pastries, and easy snacks to grab before walking across the street to the port for a dip in the sea to cool off. I highly recommend spending some time in this town or staying nearby, as it has such a lively, fun energy.

After almost a week in Santa Cesarea Terme, we drove north to the Selva di Fasano to stay at our friends’ masseria for a week. Selva di Fasano sits in the hills, between the Adriatic Sea and the rolling countryside of the Valle d’Itria, surrounded by ancient olive groves and whitewashed masserie.