Puglia's rough-hewn port city where grandmothers hand-roll orecchiette in the street and the Adriatic is 50 metres from dinner
Bari sits on the heel of Italy's boot with an energy that the polished Amalfi Coast entirely lacks — this is a working Adriatic port city where seafood is pulled from the water and grilled the same day, where octopus is eaten raw at the harbour fish market, and where the old city's narrow lanes (Bari Vecchia) are filled daily with women hand-rolling orecchiette ('little ears') pasta in their own doorways, selling it by the gram to passers-by. Focaccia barese — thick, olive-oil-drenched bread topped with tomatoes and olives — is eaten at every hour. The Adriatic swimming, the Basilica di San N…
Bari's old city sits on a small peninsula that has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times, occupied in sequence by Greeks, Romans, Lombards, Byzantines, Saracens, and Normans before becoming a major Crusader port. The Basilica di San Nicola, built in 1087 to house relics of St. Nicholas (the historical figure behind Santa Claus, whose bones were brought from Myra in what is now Turkey), established Bari as one of the most important pilgrimage cities in medieval Europe — a status that funded the construction of a Romanesque cathedral that still stands in near-original form.