hoever comes to Apulia has found an unique landscape. From the Gargano to the most outer point in Santa Maria di Leuca the color of the fields change in black and in conclusion into red earth. One finds however also gnarled olive trees in gnarled forms, already centuries old, but also infinite rows of vines, that gloomily carrie their loads, the grapes, and odorous,.
The Salento is the most outer corner of Apulia. There is no other place on the world, where someone can find so many olivetrees and grapevines, as here. This region, also " heel of Italy " named, is embedded between the Adriatic and Ionic sea, and forms the geografic and cultural demarcation between wests and east.
In the centuries, the cultures have alternated here, so that everyone left behind something.
Rites, that recur since centuries, are the olives - and vintage. One can find the development in sayings and the puzzles, but also in the writings of the poets and the diaries of the traveler.

It is always, since this earth, but also its population, their soul has given, for their " sacred plants ". During the harvest, after one has waited one year long patiently, the air is full with odors and the taste of the just won olive-oil.

The Salento. A white earth, lime-containing, where the water vanished in the meanders, we are enchanted by an intact and primitive landscape of the present

Here, surrounded from palms and mediterranean pines, which delimit the streets burnt from the sun, we push, after we chirp the crickets behind us to the so-called " paiarises ", places like garages, where in other times there were left objects needed in the fields. This were places where people was able to find refuge. Buildings with magnificent gates, rich-decorated and big windows. These farms were, to the protection of the hinterland and the surrounding villages, on the whole coast of the Salento, from Otranto until Gallipoli. They were often, so that they attracted less attention, situated between bushes of thyme, just as the thorny shoveling of that fig-trees. The lighthouses announced the arrival of the Saracen pirates with their light then.

So, the Salento can be called, the earth between two seas.

The day can for those, that would like to visit this splendid earth, after one marches past at fields, visits farms or enjoys the untouched coasts, actually only finish at the table of a country-inn finishes. These small, but fine guest-yards have prescribed themselves to the Agriturism. Here, one can enjoy the simple courts of the salentine kitchen, this is now at the free nature, under vines, or in the old wine-cellars, that if it will be heated by wood-ovens. Here, one has time to tell histories to each other and to drink wine then sufficiently. In single country-guest-yards, it is also possible, in rooms with big iron-laying, to sleep.


These are impressions that nobody will forget and which wake up a kind of nostalgy in everyone that sees it