Italy’s seductive south is incredible and unforgettable

If we are to trust the geographers, southern Italy probably should begin immediately south of a small and ancient bridge in Umbria – the centro geografico d’Italia – or geographical centre of Italy.

That’s all of three hours north of Naples, the city from where conventional wisdom tends to dictate that the south of the country begins.

I’m visiting neither Ponte Cardona, part of an ancient Roman aqueduct system, nor Naples, but heading due south with Rome the starting point.

The eternal city is so infernally unkempt in parts these days that it almost conforms to the stereotype of the south, where the ratio of laundry per poorly constructed high-rise balcony escalates dramatically and where, as the theory goes, order ends and chaos begins.

It tends to indicate that the concept of the south of Italy is far more on a psychological and economical basis than a strictly geographic one.

I’m putting it all behind me, literally, and surrendering to the south, wherever it really begins, embarking from the Italian capital to Palermo, on a 17-day “Italy, the Deep South & Sicily” Albatross Tours’ fully escorted journey.

The beauty of this itinerary is that it offers the opportunity to gain a proper sense of southern Italy as a whole, beyond those stereotypes (while perhaps confirming a few as well).

The tour connects the major regions of the south, chiefly Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily.

Far from the notorious “if-it’s-Monday-we-must-be-in-Messina” regimentation of other multi-day guided tours, this journey involves multiple nights in selected destinations, such as a lavish four in Sicily’s fashionable Taormina and, surprise, surprise, oodles of free time.

True south | Rome to Alberobello

Shedding the scruffy outskirts of Rome the view from the coach offers a stark contrast to the glories of its historic Centro Storico but it’s not long before its Seven Hills are replaced by the many gently undulating ones of the south.

It’s somewhere along the autostrada that our tell-all guide for the journey, Richard, a genial and patient Englishman, takes to the onboard microphone to recount the story of Battaglia del grano (Battle for Grain), Italy’s own “wheat of the never never”.

It began in the 1920s when Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime launched a disastrous campaign to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat production, freeing Italy from the “slavery of foreign bread”.

Although wheat production was increased, the scheme resulted in a disastrous rise in food prices for Italians and their families, as farmers, particularly those in the more agrarian south, who had grown other staples, were forced to clear their land for grain.

Soon the north versus south divide becomes a regular topic on the tour with Ellis explaining that northern Italians like to dismiss southerners as indolent “pasta eaters”, while southerners deride northerners as “gnocchi eating” (ouch) workaholics.

On a more serious note, run your finger down a chart of Italy’s regions and you’ll find that most of those in the south remain at or near the bottom of the list when it comes to wealth.

However, I can detect no deprivations aboard our comfortable, air-conditioned, Wi-Fi equipped coach (never, ever, call it a “bus”) with 28 passengers aboard.

With the capacity of the coach being about double that number, there’s plenty of room for everyone to stretch out.

At the wheel is our non-English speaking, stylish driver Fabio, so unexpectedly, well, cool he could have well been some sort of Italian rock heart-throb in another life.

After a few hours on the autostrada with Fabio in firm command upfront, any delusion that travelling independently by car might have been the way to go is dispelled as local drivers stream past us like turbo-charged Gaggias on four wheels.

Even though many roads south from Rome tend to lead to Naples, our itinerary eschews the latter. (You can’t see everything, right?)

The coach passes only a distant Mount Vesuvius, its slopes a thick necklace of stunningly intense – and should the volcano one day erupt, perilous – human habitation.

After a day travelling across the Apennines range, by the late afternoon we’re at our first major destination, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed town of Alberobello, with a population of about 10,000, wedged in the heel of the boot of Italy in the region of Puglia.

This will be our home for three nights with each couple and single traveller assigned their own traditional 18th-century-style trullo stone cottage, managed by the suitably named Charming Trulli.

Characterised by their peculiar witch’s-hat-conical roofs, the trullo is one of Italy’s great architectural curiosities.

The word “trullo” is derived from the Greek word tholos meaning “dome” with the roofs of the houses made without mortar, using only limestone slabs placed on top of each other.

No one can conclusively explain how the trulli came to be designed in such a novel style, though one theory suggests they were built to avoid paying taxes.

Due to their simple construction, it’s theorised that the houses could be easily dismantled when the tax collectors from Naples came to town and then reassembled relatively quickly.

Today, the cottages aren’t going anywhere and doubtless make for a decent tax deduction for those, including many expatriates from the UK and elsewhere, who have restored them and let them on the local accommodation market.

It all makes the agreeable Alberobello feel and look a little like Chariots of the Gods meets The Block, with the strangeness of these trulli houses accentuated by mysterious limestone daubings on some of their roofs.

Trulli aren’t the only claim to fame in this part of southern Italy with the origins of burrata (Italian cow’s milk cheese), orecchiette (ear-shaped pasta) and bombette Pugliesi (small rolls of meat stuffed with pancetta and caciocavallo cheese), all traceable to Puglia’s la cucina povera (the cuisine of the poor) culinary heritage.

Our tour group samples all of these dishes and even learns how to make the aforementioned ear-shaped pasta at an excellent restaurant, Trattoria Terra Madre, which, complete with its own kitchen garden, is off a small square near our trulli.

Down, down, deeper down | Matera to Taormina

After those trulli memorable three nights in Alberobello, we’re back on the road inside the comfort of Fabio’s gleaming chariot, fastidiously preened and polished during his driver downtime.

From here, the coach carefully descends from a plateau studded with Puglia’s ubiquitous sentinel sugar-white towns and villages, perhaps best typified by Ostuni, founded 600 years before Christ.

From a distance, these towns seem to drip like cake icing down the sides of rugged rises with each staring down on vast plains of dense army-green olive groves, sadly benighted by an unchecked disease, xylella fastidiosa.

In the past decade or so, the disease has killed one-third of Puglia’s estimated 60 million olive trees, some of them as old as three millennia.

Eventually, this sadly depleted though still impressive arboreal spectacle submits to Puglia’s dazzling azure Adriatic coastline, festooned with far less lofty towns and villages.

Each clings, almost miraculously, to towering cliffs, appearing to converge as one with the variety of haphazard man-made constructions that crown them.

Although Alberobello and Matera, our next stop for two nights, are a mere hour apart by road, Fabio and Richard are, thankfully, taking us on the long way there, via the quintessential and dazzling Puglian seaside towns Polignano a Mare and Monopoli.

The former town of close to 20,000, with its warren of white marbled pedestrianised streets and laneways, is renowned in Italy for Lama Monachile Cala Porto, a heart-shaped sliver of sand formed between the sides of dual cliff faces, with the whitewashed houses built right to the rock edge.

By late in the day when we reach the monumental Matera, said to be one of the world’s three oldest cities, I lose all sense of what part of Italy’s podiatry we find ourselves in.

However, it seems we’re now ensconced in the instep of the boot, namely the region of Basilicata that borders Puglia.

Back into the hills, Matera is perhaps the place that once represented Italy’s geographic and social divide and the relative indifference of the north to the south.

It was here in the 1950s, following a national outcry, that the city’s impoverished cave-dwelling citizens were “rescued” from the shame of their disease-ridden, unsanitary living conditions, with much of the population transferred to modern “new town” flats.

Tourists eschew the new town in favour of the characterful old town, where those abandoned caves have now been converted into luxury accommodation such as Sextantio Le Grotte Della Civita, at the craggy base of this treeless stone city.

After a couple of nights of trog delights at Sextantio Le Grotte Della Civita, it’s time to move on again. Tour itineraries such as this one wait for no man or woman with seductive Sicily beckoning.

From White Lotus to a white Etna | Messina to Taormina

Heading further south and passing through Calabria towards what must represent the prominent big toe of that omnipresent boot, we’re bound for the slender strait between mainland Italy and Sicily.

From here the coach will enter a ferry for the short voyage to Messina, the island’s third biggest city, and around the coast to Taormina.

By the time we’re in Sicily, I find my mind drifting towards matters mafia. For most visitors to Italy, the spectre of the country’s violent and reactionary contemporary past, not only involving the mafia, is largely invisible.

But, for those with knowledge, interest and, yes, concern for that bloody history, back in Puglia there’s at least one park and a square named after Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister kidnapped and later assassinated by the ruthless Red Brigades terrorist organisation.

Further afield, at Capaci on the outskirts of Palermo, we pass two obelisks flanking the autostrada, erected in memory of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two anti-organised crime judges assassinated by the Sicilian mafia in the early 1990s. The city’s small airport is also named in honour of the crusading pair.

During the tour, the headlines are full of the news of the arrest of 109 suspected members of the Calabrian Ndrangheta mafia-style organisation, while on my return there’s a report of the intimidation of a judge in Puglia, where organised crime has infiltrated the lucrative tourism industry.

Yet wherever there is a little darkness there is also much light. One of the more surprising pleasures of this coach journey are the toilet stops. Everywhere along the autostrada almost every service station features its own fully functional cafe with real baristas. Here benzine takes second place to caffeine.

It doesn’t take our coffee-loving group of Australians long to master the system, which, similarly to cafes elsewhere, involves deciding on your order, paying the cashier and obtaining a ticket to drink and eat at the counter (or pay the extra charge to sit at a table, which most impatient Italians don’t).

It’s here that I learn to eat arancini, rice balls stuffed with meat or vegetables and wrapped in greaseproof paper, by hand rather than on a plate with cutlery.

After a full day on the road, we finally arrive in Taormina, where there’s less talk of the much hyped The White Lotus TV series famously shot around here, and more on the unseasonal clerical-like white bib of snow that covers the summit of Mount Etna, the peak that looms down on this part of Sicily.

Ever since the success of the series, luxury labels have been buying up Taormina businesses and converting them to exclusive boutiques to cater for the influx of affluent European and American tourists. One of those businesses includes a historic cafe, the Mocambo Bar, known for its granita, which was bought by Dolce & Gabbana.

Of course, in reality, the trendy Taormina of today was discovered long before The White Lotus helped induce its renaissance, with the town beloved of artistic luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Alexandre Dumas and Gustav Klimt.

Won over by the west | Taormina to Palermo

Loud. Chaotic. Gritty. Irresistible. The informally organised fish markets in the old town area of Catania, an hour or so down the coast from Taormina, are scattered around the blood and bone-covered streets near the duomo.

It’s a living, breathing – well, not the fish – metaphor for Sicily itself, and I imagine that the arrangement of these markets has remained largely unchanged for centuries.

Today, with so much spring snow on the slopes of the 3357-metre Etna, I’ve skipped a tour to its summit in favour of an independent visit to Sicily’s captivating second-biggest city.

Catania’s fish market, around which good seafood restaurants cling like an octopus, is an unholy festival of gesticulation, as stallholders and customers, almost nose to nose, furiously negotiate prices for each catch.

It was Etna that made Catania the model World Heritage-listed Baroque showpiece that it is today, following the 1669 eruption when massive lava flows destroyed not only villages in its wake but also the city.

Inside the duomo, there’s a rather confronting wooden carving that wraps around a priestly lectern depicting, almost cartoon-like, the horror of it all with humans and animals swept up into the ferocious flow. There’s even a whole Greek Doric temple turned on its side, helpless in the face of nature’s molten might.

Yet even the might of nature has seemingly exerted less power on Sicily than that of successive human conquerors, including Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, the French, Germans, and the Spanish, over the past 2500 years.

Even the comparatively brief occupation by the Americans is said to have left its mark, having led to the post-war entrenchment of the nefarious Cosa Nostra whose tentacles would entwine all aspects of Italian society for the next half-century,

After Catania, the days that follow are punctuated by pilgrimages to Sicily’s myriad archaeological sites as we edge across the island.

These include the remarkably intact ruins of the well-named Valley of Temples, near the city of Agrigento and the extraordinarily well-preserved and extensive tiled mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale.

Then there’s Archaeological Park Neapolis of Syracuse, comprising the Roman Amphitheatre, the Greek Theatre and the Orecchio di Dionisio, a limestone cave shaped like an ear where Pavarotti once performed a recital.

Further west again, after surviving for centuries, the unfinished fifth century BC Greek Doric temple at Segesta was almost destroyed by wildfires – more and more the summer scourge of a melting Mediterranean.

Segesta only became fully accessible to visitors after 20 years due to the prolonged structural work required to reinforce the site.

The temple, the work of an Athenian architect, commands a hilltop overlooking the Gulf of Castellammare and surrounding patchwork farmland. Higher still, and best reached by shuttle bus, is an ancient amphitheatre that in its heyday could sit 3000 spectators.

Unlike the Doric wonders of the Valley of the Temples, visitors can wander around the interior of the Segesta Temple, considered to be the best surviving and preserved example of its type in all of Europe.

The final few days of our journey are devoted to exploring the south-western and north-western pockets of this diverse island.

There’s a stay near Marsala, home of the eponymous fortified wine, at luxury resort Baglio Oneto dei Principi di San Lorenzo; a languid al fresco lunch in the shaded garden of an artisan olive oil farm, Mandranova; an interlude in the fishing port of Sciacca with its quiet streets fringed by orange trees and zig-zag stone staircases with tile trims. Bellissimo.

When we eventually arrive in Palermo, a full fortnight since we left Rome and more than a few thousand or more kilometres on Fabio’s speedo, every vehicle – cars, buses, trucks, you name it – is caked in a patina of thick brown dust.

It’s nature’s special delivery from the Sahara, a visual reminder of how close Sicily is to Africa with Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, a similar distance as that between Sydney and Canberra.

As we pull into Palermo, a city of 850,000, for the penultimate night of the tour, it has been an incredible, unforgettable journey of discovery from north to south. I’d love to return one day, perhaps even start my next north-south Italian odyssey from that obscure bridge back in Umbria.

FIVE MORE THINGS TO SEE AND DO IN ITALY’S SOUTH

Lecce, Puglia
Puglia’s elegant premier city is a showcase of Baroque architecture, famed for caffe leccese, the city’s homegrown cold beverage, made with ice cubes, espresso, and a dash of fresh almond milk or almond milk syrup.

Matera, Basilicata
A few kilometres from this ancient city is the extraordinary Crypt of the Original Sin. A natural cave church dating as early as the eighth century, its walls are adorned with well-preserved frescoes depicting biblical scenes.

Ortigia, Sicily
On an island beside the Greek and Roman ruins of historic Syracuse, the narrow marbled streets of gorgeous Ortigia built around the seventh century Duomo di Siracusa – itself built on the site of an ancient Greek temple – are filled with good seafood eateries.

Porto Palo, Sicily
This small seaside village on the bottom of the west coast is home to the legendary Da Vittorio beachside restaurant, a feature of the tour itinerary, specialising in sublime fresh seafood enhanced with traditional Sicilian flavours.

Palermo, Sicily
Culturally-rich Palermo boasts one of Italy’s most astonishing private museums, the Rooms at the Museum of Majolica Genius, a hard-to-find showcase of majolica tiles stretching across eight rooms in a palace apartment. Every one of its walls is lined with almost 5000 rare and decorative tiles. See stanzealgenio.it

THE DETAILS

TOUR
The Australia-based Albatross Tours’ 17-day “Italy, the Deep South & Sicily” fully-escorted journey by first-class air-conditioned coach begins in Rome and concludes in Palermo, Sicily. The in-depth tour, with its emphasis on free time, includes extended stays in Alberobello, Puglia and Taormina, Sicily.

BOOK
Prices, airfares excluded, from $10,347 a person, including 16 nights’ hotel accommodation, 28 meals and more. Phone 1300 135 015 to book or visit albatrosstours.com.au

FLY
Emirates flies daily from Australia to Dubai with connections to Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. From Palermo, take a domestic flight to Fiumicino and connect with Emirates internationally to Australia, via Dubai. See emirates.com

The writer travelled to Italy as a guest of Albatross Tours and with the assistance of Emirates.