This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
In the far south of Italy, the “heel of the boot” allows you to really enjoy cycling. Between whitewashed villages and idyllic coves, baroque cities and noble vineyards, the roads invite you to take trips that are sometimes contemplative, sometimes meditative. Overview of a week of cycling in Salento, between Matera and Lecce.
Feeling the caress of tall grass on your leg, along the dry stone walls. Smelling the heady scent of oleanders, passing under their drooping branches. Then, crossing paths with the flight of pink flamingos on a seaside path, before being flashed a smile by an old man with weathered skin, sitting on a terrace: so many situations that you only experience on a bike, when you explore the roads of Puglia.
If only it were that: in the village stalls that line the Apulian roads, fior di latte gelato never tastes as good as after a good sweat session on two wheels, and the Aperol spritz at the end of the day is all the more refreshing because it has been earned by the strength of the calves.
Not to mention that in a country that is not known for its beaches, Puglia has miles of them, and beautiful ones; taking a dip between two pedal strokes is as enjoyable as it is beneficial, under the solar pounding of the south.
Between green and sea
A region hammered by the sun but soothed by the sea breeze, Puglia carves out a delicious point in the south-east of Italy. Not very mountainous but very rural, here green, there rough as dry skin, the region lends itself well to discovery by bike, with its low gradients, despite roads with sometimes stunted asphalt.
Everywhere the vine is queen, everywhere the olive trees are as twisted as they are virtuous, as they cling to the stones that serve as their base. How many have seen the Greek, Swabian, Angevin or Aragonese conquerors pass through, over the centuries? Several, judging by the size and age – up to 3000 years – of certain ancestors with cracked trunks.
Along the 865 km coastline, one also comes across a few fortified towns and villages – including the impetuous Castro – and a good number of watchtowers, sentinels from which the movements of the enemy were scrutinized. The Cathedral of Otranto thus keeps within its walls the memory of that day in 1480 when 813 Christians who had taken refuge there passed by the edge of the Ottoman sword, refusing to renounce their faith, as recalled by their bones piled up in the chapel of the martyrs.
Amazing steps
However, no one experiences torture when cycling along the quiet roads of the Apulian coast and hinterland, and discovering splendid stops such as Porto Cesareo or Tricase Porto. If it were not for their presence on a cycle route, one might avoid these charming villages where fishing boats bob. As for Matera, it is impossible to miss.
Although this fabulous city is located in neighboring Basilicata, its proximity to Puglia makes it an unmissable stop: the sassi, its troglodyte cavities, have been inhabited since the Paleolithic. Today, its tangle of dwellings is one with its beige hills, like a gigantic cubist work emerging from the dust of the Mezzogiorno.
Driving east, strange constructions soon appear in the Itria Valley: these are the trulli, small circular dwellings with conical roofs, similar to elf houses. They mushroom as you approach Alberobello, where 1,500 of them form an astonishing agglomeration of Lilliputian houses. Some are inhabited, others are occupied by a bar serving primitivo or a restaurant offering orecchiette, the typical pasta of Puglia.
After Alberobello, we quickly wind our way through the alleys of villages, all dazzling with whiteness and freshness, and whose weave is scattered in a labyrinth of alleys and passages punctuated by small squares; getting lost by bike in Locorotondo, Martina Franca and Cisternino is downright slow tracking forward.
Puglia by the sea
Whether you’re tired or not, the towns and villages of Puglia demand a minimum of downtime. No question of collapsing into bed when you can sit down at a table in Gallipoli, a beautiful fortified city where the walls turn red in the sunset and the beaches become discos when night falls.
It is also unthinkable not to explore the daredevil passages and staircases of Ostuni, the “White City” which seems to take itself for an Arab medina or a Cycladic city – after all, Greece is only 125 km away, right across the street.
On the Adriatic coast, the high cliffs contrast with the blond beaches of the Ionian coast, while the road is all yours with the void that precedes the sea. And if the climbs on the bike are sometimes tough, the descents are so exhilarating that you quickly find yourself with dry teeth, from smiling at the wind.
The end of a world
There is just as much joy in Santa Maria di Leuca, this town with its fanciful villas and its promontory bristling with a lighthouse forming the meeting point between the Ionian and Adriatic seas, between the lights of the East and the West.
Further north, Lecce shines permanently: the honey-coloured limestone of its baroque pearls gives them a brilliance so intense that it dazzles, even at night. In this “Florence of the South”, there is no need for sun to be blinded by grace: the light seems permanently impregnated in the stone.
A stone so soft that it even softens the influence of the centuries, the passage of which is never better grasped than by slowing down and taking your time… on a bike.
The author was the guest of Ekilib, who had no say in the text.
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