Best Of

Our first morning in Lecce was completely free. Many of the group, including me, chose to do a walking tour of the former Jewish District, beginning and ending with a visit to the Jewish Museum. One of my “missions” during my travels is to find weddings, and I was rewarded with seeing a bride and groom emerge from the cathedral next to the Jewish Museum. I saw them each release a white dove from a cardboard box. ( I’m glad that I was not expected to do that when I got married!).

After a walking tour of the city that afternoon (which I cut short because of the heat), we departed the city for a tour of a masseria, a former farmhouse in which the owners and workers lived together. It was set up as a museum, showing how the people lived and worked. We were entertained by musicians and dancers in the courtyard, and several of our group (not I) joined in the dancing. The entertainment was followed by dinner at the masseria. I very much enjoyed that evening.

I could have done without the visits the following day to Galantina and Otranto, but undoubtedly my perception was affected by the heat. The main reason for visiting those towns was to see churches. Galantina’s Basilica of Santa Caterina d’Allessandria is full of Gothic frescoes, which were quite colorful, but, to me, not worth the trip. We were there on Sunday morning, and could not enter the church when we first got to the town because Mass was going on. We had a short walking tour of the town, which was locked up tight. Thankfully, we were able to take advantage of a cafe that was open while we waited for Mass to be over.

Otranto was a nice, hilly, seaside town. The main attraction in Otranto was a cathedral, this one with a medieval mosaic covering almost the the entire floor of the nave. The mosaic includes a representation of the Tree of Life and Biblical stories. Although there were some pews covering part of the mosaic (so worshippers must have been able to tread on it), tourists had to walk up the side aisles, so I was not able to get what I considered a satisfactory view of it. Otranto is also known for “the martyrs of Otranto,” 813 Christians who were put to death for refusing to renounce their faith after the city was conquered by the Ottomans in 1480. They were canonized by Pope Francis in 2013. Their bones are enshrined in the cathedral. Otranto was the first place that we were able to view the Adriatic. The water looked so appealing! I wish that we could have taken a swim.

The following day was one of my favorites of the tour. We went to Alberobello, and took a walking tour among the trulli houses. Tauck has arranged for their guests to enter one of the houses, where the wife was folding blankets and the husband was shelling fava beans. They have been living in that house for over 40 years. Each conical roof tops one room of a home or other building. The house that we visited included a living/dining room, good-sized bedroom and kitchen. (Their wedding photos were on display in the living room.) They also had a garden next to their home. Some of the trullis, though not the one we visited, contained garages. The central area of the town, where the buildings were also whitewashed, but not with conical roofs, was full of shops and restaurants. We went to a balsamic vinegar tasting in one of the shops.

Tauck saved the best hotel for last — but it was not the hotel that is featured in Tauck’s 2025 brochure. Instead of the Masseria il Melograno, we stayed at Masseria Torre Maizza, which is a Rocco Forte hotel. The individual rooms were sort of like separate cabins that were connected, but not in such a way that we realized that we were connected to any other room. Each had its own entrance from the garden, and we even had a back door off the bathroom that led to a private patio with table and chairs, an umbrella and lounge chairs. The hotel also had a resident goose, sort of a mascot, that was stationed outside our front door when my daughter and I were trying to leave for the farewell dinner…so we “escaped” through the back door off the bathroom. I wish we could have spent more days at that hotel.

We had an unscheduled treat on our final day, during which we went to beautiful Polignano a Mare. Thomas, our TD, used the last of his discretionary fund to book a boat trip so we could view the town from the sea. We had great views of the cliffs and caves on which the town rests. The boat trip was followed by Tuk Tuk rides to town for a walking tour there, with time for lunch and shopping on our own.

My daughter and I were not scheduled to leave for the airport until the afternoon of our get-away day. We were not able to get a late check-out (there was a wedding scheduled at the hotel that evening, which might have been the reason), but while my daughter had a massage, I sat by the pool and read. We then had lunch poolside before we had to leave.

This was a good tour, especially our first and last stops, that was marred by the heat. The tour is listed as an activity level of 3, but it could have been a 4. There were a lot of stairs in Matera and hills everywhere except the city of Lecce. In Lecce, our bus could not enter the town center, and it was about a 10 minute walk to and from the hotel to the pick-up point. I think that this would be a difficult trip for anyone who had problems walking. As I recommended in my review of the Northern Italy tour that immediately preceded this one, I would recommend going earlier in the year or the fall. People kept saying that it was “unseasonably warm,” but I would not take the chance that it would be cooler in the coming years

My daughter and I took this tour together in celebration of her birthday. She loves Italy, and this was a region that neither she nor I had yet visited. I’m very glad to have seen this region, but I wish that I had done it earlier or later in the year, because the weather was uncomfortably hot for the entire tour — in the 90s most days, with one day peaking at over 100. We were a group of 22 seasoned travelers, all from the East Coast except for one couple from Australia. On the schedule that our Tour Director, Thomas, passed out at the beginning of the tour, he listed the daily activity level. Most days were “moderate to robust,” with one day being simply “robust.” I think that at least one of the other days, our first full day in Matera, could have been characterized simply as “robust.”

I was surprised to learn that Matera is not in Puglia, but in Basilicata, on the border of Puglia. Wikipedia reports that it is the 3rd oldest city in the world, after Aleppo and Jericho. Our hotel’s rooftop bar offered a gorgeous view of the city, as did the plaza in front of the hotel. Take pictures during the day and at night. The night-time views are gorgeous. When we were there, we were told that Mel Gibson was filming “The Chosen,” (definitely not based on Chaim Potok’s book of the same name!) using the city and countryside to portray Jerusalem at the time of Christ, and that he had used the same backdrop in “The Passion of the Christ.” From the rooftop bar, we could see the film crew working in the distance.

Matera is made of stone. It’s beige, beige and more beige, but beautiful in its own way. We began our touring with a visit to a multimedia presentation about the city that showed people and livestock sharing space in caves, stassis, well into the 1950s, when it was called “the Shame of Italy” because of the unsanitary living conditions. The government then moved people out of the stassis into housing developments located in the modern part of the city (which we did not visit), leaving the stassis abandoned. They have since been transformed into hotels, restaurants and shops, and in 2019, Matera was named the European Capital of Culture. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage site. The presentation that we saw was about 20-30 minutes long and was an excellent introduction to the city and its history. After our lunch (with wine, as I believe all included meals were) in a cave restaurant (down hills and multiple steps), we visited a cave museum that was furnished to show how people lived, complete with photos of a family, their donkeys and the “manure room.” Given the heat, Thomas took pity on the group and ordered Tuk-Tuks to take people back to the hotel, avoiding the uphill climb and steps. Most people, including me, took advantage of the Tuk-Tuks.I used some free time later that afternoon to visit the cathedral that was across the plaza from our hotel. It had an entrance fee of 3.5 euros. A portion of the cathedral has been excavated and the excavated area covered with clear flooring, so I could look down and see what looked like Roman ruins and Byzantine-era frescoes.

The same at the hotel we were "The Masseria Torre Maizza". The online prices made me almost fall off my chair.