A couple of pictures from Kazimierz Dolny, all taken during one of the least busy days for this picturesque small town. During May and June weekends it is absolutely swamped with tourists – you could hardly see one on a foggy November Saturday.
Kilka ujęć z Kazimierza Dolnego, zrobionych w trakcie jednego z najspokojniejszych w ciągu roku dni dla tego małego miasteczka. W maju i czerwcu przeżywa ono wprost oblężenie ze strony warszawskich turystów – w listopadową dżdżystą sobotę trudno natomiast byłoby dopatrzeć się choćby jednego.
Valle d’Itria is a region in Puglia famous for the trullo dwellings (more about them in this post), olives and wines (surprisingly: white ones and not the red primitivo and nero d’avola for which the Southern regions of Salento and Manduria are famous). The official website of the Itria Valley is http://www.valleditria.it/.
Locorotondo is a town in the Itria Valley in the province of Bari with a circular historical centre (hence the name: loco rotondo – the round place). It is a calm place with whitewash houses and narrow streets. The last two pics show a festival of Apulian food which takes place in Locorotondo every September. The official website of the Locorotondo municipality is: http://www.comune.locorotondo.ba.it/comune-di-locorotondo
Streets of Locorotondo on a lazy Sunday afternoon
A view of La Valle d’Itria from Locorotondo.
Narrow lanes of Locorotondo
Locorotondo main square at night
Rooftops of trulli houses in the region of Alberobello.
Chiesa dell’ Addolorata in Locorotondo
Locorotondo
Narrow lanes of Locorotondo
Locorotondo
Chiesa Madre San Giorgio in Lotorotondo
Narrow lanes of Locorotondo
Locorotondo
Narrow lanes of Locorotondo
Vintage fiat 500 in Locorotondo
An Italian guy grilling octopuses.
An Italian guy preparing grilled octopus sandwich.
Ostuni is situated on a hill just around eight kilometres from the Adriatic coast and is an architectural masterpiece, with practically all buildings built from white stone and painted with bright white paint. It is thus often referred to as La Città Bianca (“the White Town” in Italian). The official website of the Ostuni municipality: http://www.comune.ostuni.br.it/.
Ostuni
Ostuni
Vintage Fiat 500 in Ostuni
Ostuni
Streets of Ostuni
Fiat 126 by FSM (made in Poland) in Ostuni, Puglia, Italy
Streets of Ostuni
Ostuni at night
Pilone is a fantastic beach just a couple of kilometres from the town of Fasano.
Castel del Monte is a unique piece of medieval military architecture, built by Emperor Frederic II in the 13th century in the middle of nowhere. It was built in an octagonal shape, with each of the eight corners also having an octagonal tower.
Trani, also known as the ‘pearl of Puglia’, is a beautiful small seaport town on the Adriatic Sea. Apart from the harbour, it boasts a huge cathedral (Basilica Cattedrale di Trani) and a castle (Castello Svevo).
Basilica Cattedrale di Trani, Castello Svevo in the background
Pier in Trani
Pier in Trani
Basilica Cattedrale di Trani
Basilica Cattedrale di Trani
Trani
Bari is the capital of Puglia and its largest city. It boasts two remarkable churches: Basilica San Nicola and the cathedral (Duomo di Bari or Cattedrale di San Sabino) and a castle (Castello Normanno-Svevo). Because we only reached Bari late in the evening and it was raining, my pictures are limited to Bari’s monuments and streets at night.
Alberobello is the capital of the trulli houses, limestone dwellings common in the Puglia region in Southern Italy.
It is not crystal clear how old the trulli houses are and there is a couple of interesting theories regarding their potential origin:
due to deforestation (forests were cut to make room for vineyards, olive trees and citrus groves) there was not enough wood to construct wooden structures, whereas limestone was abundant;
they were built by the ancients, similar to the nuraghi towers in Sardinia and the tholoi tombs of Mycenae;
they were built by the peasants as means of tax evasion, since only ‘permanent structures’ were taxed (whereas a trullo can be literally demolished in a couple of minutes: the stone can be pulled out of the roof because it is not connected with a cement or anything else);
they were built by poor peasants because, again, ‘permanent structures’ were forbidden by landlords to whom the land in Puglia generally belonged until 19th century.
For me the last one is probably the most convincing.
It seems that until recently people of Puglia were ashamed of living in trulli houses and were trying to move out to more ‘permanent’ structures as soon as possible. It is only a couple of years ago that the trulli houses were rediscovered as a tourist attraction and appreciated by UNESCO by being listed as world heritage.
Matera is a stunning ten-thousand-year-old city carved out in stone. It is the second-largest city of the Basilicata region in Southern Italy (the ancient region of Lucania, or in Greek: Λευκανία).
Matera has two famous stone districts (also called ‘sassi’):Sasso Caveoso (the older one, with homes – or holes – carved out in the rock) and Sasso Barisano (the newer one, in which parts of the houses are carved out in the rock and parts are built in traditional style).
Even in the 20th century, infant mortality rate in Matera’s sassi was as high as 50%. An average house was inhabited by a three-generation family with up to six children as well as the livestock. It is hard to believe that a good couple of years after World War II people in Western Europe still lived in such sub-standard conditions. Moreover, the Italian government undertook any actions whatsoever to change this situation after the publication of a book by Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (Italian: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli). Below is a paragraph describing everyday life in the sassi of Matera at the time Levi visited Matera (early 1940s):
“I set out at last to find the town. A little beyond the station I found a street with a row of houses on one side and on the other a deep gully. In the gully lay Matera. From where I was, higher up, it could hardly be seen because the drop was so sheer. All I could distinguish as I looked down were alleys and terraces, which concealed the houses from view. Straight across from me there was a barren hill of an ugly gray color, without a single tree or sign of cultivation upon it, nothing but sun-baked earth and stones. At the bottom of the gully a sickly, swampy stream, the Bradano, trickled among the rocks. The hill and the stream had a gloomy, evil appearance that caught at my heart. The gully had a strange shape: it was formed by two half -funnels, side by side, separated by a narrow spur and meeting at the bottom, where I could see a white church, Santa Maria de Idris, which looked half -sunk in the ground. The two funnels, I learned, were called Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. They were like a schoolboy’s idea of Dante’s Inferno. And, like Dante, I too began to go down from circle to circle, by a sort of mule path leading to the bottom. The narrow path wound its way down and around, passing over the roofs of the houses, if houses they could be called. They were caves, dug into the hardened clay walls of the gully, each with its own façade, some of which were quite handsome, with eighteenth-century ornamentation. These false fronts, because of the slope of the gully, were flat against its side at the bottom, but at the top they protruded, and the alleys in the narrow space between them and the hillside did double service: they were a roadway for those who came out of their houses from above and a roof for those who lived beneath. The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came in through the front doors.
Some of them had no entrance but a trapdoor and ladder. In these dark holes with walls cut out of the earth I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds, and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry. On the floor lays dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children, and animals. This is how twenty thousand people live.”
Following the international success of the book, the Italian government forcefully moved the entire population of the sassi to nearby modern blocks of flats, as the unsanitary conditions in the sassi houses were considered to be a shame for the Italian Republic.
Recently, Matera was immortalised by Mel Gibson in his famous “Passion of the Christ” movie, since many scenes (for example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovBQZbrKZEU) were shot not in Jerusalem but in Matera.
View of the typical Basilicata landscape from the town of Craco
Craco
Remains of the main square of Craco
Craco
Ruins in Craco
Ruins in Craco
Remains of the main church in Craco
Craco in Basilicata
Craco in Basilicata
Basilicata landscape
View from the main tower of Craco. This was the filming location of the “Passion of the Christ” by Mel Gibson – the famous scene in which Judas hangs himself.
Main tower of Craco
View from the main tower of Craco. Near the down-left corner, there is a broken rusty car on the hill.
