Italy – San Vito, Bari and Trani

Day 70 Wednesday 24th October 2023 - San Vito, Bari and Trani

Today we head north on our way back to Rome leaving our home base of 5 nights in Monopoli, which had been a great base to explore Puglia and the Itria Valley regions.

A short drive and our first stop at San Vito, Tania had read this was worth a stop and look - it was for 10 minutes and we had seen it all !!

Next stop Bari, which could have been an option to stay as our base for exploring Puglia. We parked in a commercial parking station and walked to the waterfront and Centro area to start our "Tania Tour".

Centro was similar to the others we had been exploring, but one stand out here was being able to watch as women formed up fresh pasta in the laneways as we stood and watched. This encouraged us to have some pasta for lunch, stopped at a restaurant, ordered some orcchiette di rapa (pasta with turnip heads) and some ravioli with tomato sauce. As always we share the dishes, but in this case both were uninspiring and luke warm - very disappointing ! At least Tania's tiramisu was acceptable. It started to rain in Bari but never amounted to much - thunderstorms had been predicted !

Back in the car and headed for Trani, our designated overnight stop, which was based on driving time and direction. Arriving before check in time, we just put "Trani" as the destination in our GPS (Google Maps) and let it take us to where it thinks the town centre is. As we get close, we start looking for a parking spot and walk in the rest of the way. We found a great park about 500 metres from the town centre. On checking the location of our accommodation, we then realised we were parked right out front !!

After checking in, we went for our walk around town and found Trani to be a VERY PLEASANT surprise. A beautiful harbour setting, fishing village and one the best cathedrals we have seen - so plain and simple inside. There were also some really nice gardens right on the foreshore, bizarrly, there was only one entrance in and out, even though the grounds were quite large.

The only disturbing thing about Trani was as we were checking in, the host warned us that this area is subject to the highest number of car thefts in the whole of Italy - we might like to consider parking in an overnight patrolled car park - we took the risk - let's see if our car is still there in the morning !

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