Food and drink
When in Martina Franca, make sure you try the local speciality ‘Capocollo’, a cured ham smoked with various herbs, laurel leaves, almonds, and the bark from Macedonian oak trees. The weekly market takes place here on a Wednesday morning, a great opportunity to stock up on fresh local produce.
Festivals
The Itria Valley Festival in July has been hosted by Martina Franca since 1975. Opera and symphony music concerts are held in palazzi and churches across the town.And in Fasano just to the north, ‘La Scamiciata’ is a month-long festival of Baroque art, music, theatre, and food-oriented evenings, culminating in a re-enactment of a famous revolt in 1678, where the townspeople fought back against Turkish raiders. Expect period costumes, trumpets and drums, and traditional Italian flag-wavers in the streets.
Nearby
Two towns you will be sure to want to visit nearby are Locorotondo and Alberobello. Locorotondo is one of the valley’s ‘città bianche’, and its distinctive feature is that the whitewashed buildings are set in a smooth arc around the hilltop (Locus Rotondus means ‘rounded place’). Classed as one of Italy’s most beautiful villages, the town is a delight to walk around, its web of streets lined with narrow rectangular houses known as ‘cummerse’, many with pointed gable roofs.
Just beyond, Alberobello is probably the most visited town in the valley, because of its extraordinary concentration of ‘trulli’, traditional dry-stone buildings with conical roofs. Its cultural importance and superb state of preservation has been officially recognised by UNESCO. You can wander up and down the picturesque streets past over 1000 trulli, stopping for a drink or gelato, or to browse the many little boutiques.
