When you return from an European holiday, the first question people ask is ‘‘What was the highlight?’’.
Still muddled from the remnants of jetlag, the brain mulls over the centuries of history and culture you have just experienced. Was it staying in the Sassi Caves in Matera - reputed to be the oldest inhabited settlement in Italy? Having a picnic on the rooftop deck of a trulli ‘‘beehive house’’ in Alberobello?
Standing in the 2500-year-old Greek and Roman ruins of the Syracuse amphitheatre or putting your hand over a vent near a crater at 2920m up Mt Etna and feeling warm air or simply sitting in an infinity pool looking out over the Sicilian countryside to the sea?
They could all be contenders and there were many more on our trip, a three-week tour of southern Italy and Sicily with Albatross Tours. I could not pick favourites as each time someone asked a new experience would come to mind. So many, I have decided to break this piece into two, starting with Puglia.
Leaving Rome we headed southeast across Italy to the small town of Alberobello, famous for its white houses with cone-shaped roofs called trulli. It is thought these homes had their origins in the imposition of taxes back in the day. When the tax man was coming they could destroy the homes quickly to avoid the tax and then rebuild.
These days the structures are permanent, mostly holiday homes or rentals in the town itself, but out in the countryside many have been renovated and are still lived in.
Some trulli still have various symbols in white on their roofs - some are astrological, some pagan - whatever they thought would help the harvest.
At the top of Alberobello is a museum in a series of conjoined trulli which gives a glimpse of what small-town rural life would have been like.
The trulli we stayed in was surprisingly spacious, including a living room and dining room with their conical roofs showcased, a bedroom and a modern bathroom. A back door led up to small terrace where we enjoyed an aperitivo, and one night a light picnic dinner of salumi, bread and cheese - we had over-indulged in the region’s orcheciate pasta and fish dishes - while we watched the sun set over the roofs of the trulli.
Alberobello’s paved and cobbled winding streets open up into squares where you often find musicians busking. One night we watched a rehearsal for an upcoming street performance.
We had a group dinner at Trattoria Terra Madre which specialised in cooking from ingredients direct from its back garden and used the old-fashioned method of ripening tomatoes strung up in bunches from the ceiling - we knew they were real when one dropped to the table during dinner.
We stumbled across the tiny 19th-century Teatro Paisiello with its neoclassical facade. It features three rows of red velvet curtained-boxes in a horseshoe around the stage and an amazing painted ceiling. The foyer features a piano owned by Italian tenor Tito Schipa (1888-1965).
On the way back roadworks provided us with an unexpected detour through the countryside, giving us an up-close look at the many small olive groves and vineyards that dot the countryside. We saw many dead and dying olive groves, victim of an imported bacteria which hit in 2013. It is reported to have killed a third of the region’s 60 million olive trees. Some groves have been replanted with resistant trees while some farmers diversified to avocados, mangos or limes as a result.
Our next stop was Ostuni, the famous whitewashed historic fortress town with amazing views over the surrounding countryside. You could easily get lost in its cobbled alleyways. We found a handy cafe built into the outside wall of the city to rest our weary feet and just absorb the view out to the sea before our tour manager Mariella found us a similarly vertically challenged vineyard, where we tasted some lovely dry rose and reds while sitting among the terraced vines.
The next day we headed over the ‘‘arch of the boot’’ to the cave city of Matera. We broke the trip with visits to the coastal towns of nano and Monopoli.
Polignano has beautiful whitewashed buildings atop a cliff, while Monopoli has a picturesque fishing harbour with blue and red boats. Both have beautiful alleyways to wander down and popular rocky swimming beaches.
The next stop felt like the middle of nowhere, a farm home to the Crypt of the Original Sin. Discovered in 1963, it is a rock church founded by Benedictines featuring frescoes dated from between the 8th and 9th centuries. Open only by appointment, the viewing is overwhelming as the door is closed, the lights go out and a soundshow talks you through its history as spotlighting illuminates each of the frescos.
While you read about Matera’s cliff-side caves nothing can prepare you for experiencing them. People lived in the caves dug out of the sides of a gorge for centuries - back to the 8th millennium BC - before being directed to move to more modern housing nearby, due to the lack of sanitation, between 1952 and 1970.
Known as the ‘‘Stassi’’, it consists of about 12 levels, spanning a height of 380m, connected by stairways and paths and was made a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1993.
Many of the caves have been turned in hotels, holiday homes, shops and craft workshops. We stayed at Le Grotte della Civita, where cave dwellings have been sympathetically turned into hotel rooms with all the modern conveniences - even air conditioning - well hidden.
There are only small windows to let light in, so the large caves are lit by candles and strategically placed spotlights, even during the day. It keeps the experience atmospheric, especially in the cave dining room, where extensive buffets of Italian specialties were laid out for dinner and breakfast.
The rustic furniture is mostly made of materials left behind in the Stassi - our sink was an old trough - and the beds are unusually high. It was explained when we visited the house cave of Vico Solitario, furnished as it would have been, that this was so animals could sleep underneath them. In the one main room entire families slept and ate. A small kitchen was carved into the wall off to the side and a smaller cave in the rear was for the animals. A few ‘‘doors’’ down is a rock church, created in the Middle Ages with frescoes still visible on the walls and alcoves.
Described by some as being like walking through a nativity scene, Matera is the site used in films such as Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ.
One of the town’s trademarks is a large loaf of bread made with a local semolina grain. Similar to a sourdough, it has a hard crust and lasts many days.
Matera is a place where prior training on a stair climber would have come in handy, especially in 30deg-plus heat. There are very few places you can go without climbing steps, although a paved road does wind its way up to the edge of the old town.
The next day we drove through Calabria to the coast to catch a ferry to Sicily. Ferries go about every 20 minutes and take about half an hour to cross - enough time for us to taste-test some of the region’s liqueurs, pistachio creme, limoncello and amaro, a herbal liqueur (too bitter).
To be continued ...
Tour v Independent travel
Not a fan of big bus tours - been there, done that in our 20s - we had debated and researched doing a self-drive tour of the region or taking trains but decided with a time limit and a lot to see, a tour made the most sense.
Having accommodation, transport and some activities organised for you and a knowledgeable tour guide also waged strongly in doing a tour’s favour. As did porterage - no lugging suitcases around - and having a great majority of the trip paid for before we left.
We selected the three-week Southern Italy and Sicily tour by Albatross Tours, as it most closely covered the places we wanted to see in southern Italy in the time we had available and also topped out at 24 passengers.
While we knew we were giving up the freedom to do our own thing by doing a tour, we did find we had enough free time on our own to look around more, relax and eat out. Some on our tour would have been keen for more free time, some less, but we found it was fine.
Another bonus to this tour, other than our wonderful tour guide Mariella who grew up in Puglia, was the two-night minimum stay at each place with a couple of four-night stays in the mix and a relaxed 9am start most days. The accommodation in most places was comfortable, central and in some cases an experience in itself. Also at most stops specialist tour guides, mostly quite entertaining and knowledgeable, showed us around sites and towns.
As it was an Australian tour company it was not surprising all our tour mates were Australian (we didn’t hold that against them) and, yes, everyone was over 50. It was great to meet new people and share travel experiences.
Our conclusion, after speaking to other travellers, is each tour and company is different. It pays to do your homework, work out how much free time you will get and want, how many nights you stay in each place and where, what is included is what you want to see, before you decide if it is an option that would work for you.
