The best time to visit Polignano a Mare is May to June or September to October, and it is not a close call. This is a small cliff town in Puglia with one famous cove, a great deal of summer…
Archives for August 2026
Getting to Polignano a Mare and the Best Day Trips
Getting to Polignano a Mare is easy, and the one thing that catches people out is the car. This is a small cliff town on the Adriatic coast of Puglia, half an hour south of Bari by train, with a…
Where to Eat and Drink in Polignano a Mare
Where to eat in Polignano a Mare divides neatly into three: a dining room inside a sea cave that you have almost certainly seen a photograph of, a handful of genuinely good informal places, and a coffee that was invented…
A Polignano a Mare Itinerary: One to Two Days
A Polignano a Mare itinerary lives or dies on timing. This is a small cliff town in Puglia that gets very busy in the middle of the day and becomes lovely again at either end of it, so the whole…
Where to Stay in Polignano a Mare
Where to stay in Polignano a Mare comes down to one decision made before any other: inside the old town, or outside it. This is a small cliff town in Puglia where the historic centre is closed to cars and…
The Best Things to Do in Polignano a Mare
The best things to do in Polignano a Mare are mostly free, mostly outdoors, and mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right hour rather than buying a ticket. This is a small town on a…
The Complete Guide to Polignano a Mare
Polignano a Mare is a town built on the edge of a cliff, and the first thing you should know is that the edge is not a figure of speech. The houses stop where the limestone stops. Whitewashed walls run…
Assisi, and the Vault by the Door
The church opens at six. I did not manage six. I managed a little after seven, which in August is still the right side of the day, before the coaches begin coming up from the valley and the stone starts…
Herculaneum, the Town That Kept Its Ceilings
I keep coming back to this bay. Not on purpose, or not entirely. It happens the way certain places arrange to happen, where you notice you are planning a route and the route has already decided something. I came for…
Modern Pompei: The Town Outside the Gates
Almost nobody looks up. You come out of the Pompei Scavi station, you turn left through the gate, you spend four hours in the first century, and you go back the way you came. The town two streets away does…
Climbing Vesuvius, and How to Combine It With Pompeii
There is one thing to know before anything else, and it is the thing that turns people away at the barrier every week. You cannot buy a ticket for the crater at the crater. There is no ticket office on…
Pompeii in the Heat, and With Children
Pompeii is a stone city with no roofs, built on a plain, facing south, with almost no trees. That sentence is the entire problem. Everything else in this guide follows from it. In July and August the site becomes an…
