Lecce is inland, and that single fact decides most of what follows. There is no sea breeze to take the edge off four in the afternoon, no water to step into when the light goes hard. The city sits on…
Supporting Guide
Where to Eat and Drink in Lecce
Lecce is not a city you eat expensively in. Three things define it, and all three cost almost nothing: a pastry, a savoury one, and a coffee poured over ice. What makes them worth writing about is not the price,…
The Best Photo Spots in Lecce
Most guides to photographing Lecce hand you a list of addresses. The addresses are not the difficult part. The old town is small, the best facades sit within a few streets of one another, and you will walk into them…
Where to Stay in Lecce
The accommodation decision in Lecce comes down to two questions, and neither is really about the hotel. Whether you sleep inside the old walls or outside them, and what you intend to do with a car. The second sounds like…
A Lecce Itinerary: 2 to 3 Days
Lecce is small enough that you could walk past every headline sight in one morning, and hot enough that trying to do so in July would spoil the trip. In high summer the highs sit around 31 to 34C, the…
The Best Things to Do in Lecce
Nothing on this list needs a car, and nothing needs a booking made weeks ahead. The old town is walkable end to end and most of what you have come for sits within a few streets of the main square,…
The Baroque of Lecce
The usual way to explain a city like this is to reach for patrons and architects and a century of ambition. Lecce has all of that, and none of it is the real answer. The real answer is under your…
The Best Beaches near Ostuni
The first thing to say, because a surprising number of people book Ostuni without knowing it: the town is not on the sea. Ostuni sits on a hill roughly seven to eight kilometres inland, looking down over an olive plain…
The Best Photo Spots in Ostuni
Ostuni is one of the easier places in Italy to photograph and one of the harder ones to photograph well, and the reason is the same in both cases: it is entirely white. A whitewashed town is enormously forgiving of…
The Best Time to Visit Ostuni
May to mid June, or September into mid October. That is the answer, it is not particularly close, and the rest of this guide is really an explanation of why. Ostuni has a specific problem that shapes the whole question…
Getting to Ostuni and the Best Day Trips
Ostuni is easy to reach and slightly awkward to arrive at, and the gap between those two things catches a lot of people out. The trains are frequent and cheap. The problem is what happens when you step off one….
Where to Eat and Drink in Ostuni
Puglian food is peasant cooking that became fashionable without changing much, which is the best thing that can happen to a regional cuisine. It is vegetable-heavy, bread-heavy, olive-oil-heavy and much simpler than the cooking of northern Italy, and Ostuni does…
