Things to Do in Bari in July

The boat tour along the Polignano a Mare coast departs from the small harbor below the town's famous cliff-perched buildings. It tracks south along a stretch of shoreline that the road above cannot reach. The limestone has been carved by the Adriatic into a sequence of sea caves, arches, and collapsed grottoes, their walls streaked turquoise and ochre where minerals have leached through. You move through these formations at idle speed, close enough to trail your hand along the wet rock. The skipper points out the Grotta Palazzese, whose natural chamber has been converted into one of Italy's most photographed restaurant terraces, visible only from the water. An aperitivo served on deck mid-tour, typically local wine or an Aperol spritz with taralli crackers, turns the return leg into a floating cocktail hour. The white town stacks above you against the sky.

This private day tour fans out from Bari into the Puglia countryside, threading through the small towns that most visitors only see from the window of a train. The route is flexible. The driver-guide typically covers Ostuni, whose whitewashed old town earns its nickname, the White City, by reflecting the July sun so fiercely you need sunglasses just to look at it. You walk through Cisternino, where butchers double as restaurants and will grill the cuts you select over olive-wood coals right in the doorway. The fat crackles. The smoke is sweet enough to taste from the street. The tour reaches into the Valle d'Itria, a patchwork of red soil, dry-stone walls, and olive groves that have been producing oil since the Romans. The silvery leaves flicker in the hot wind.

Alberobello's trulli district is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The designation does not prepare you for the strangeness of standing inside it. The conical stone roofs, built without mortar so they could be dismantled quickly to dodge property taxes centuries ago, cluster together in the Rione Monti quarter like an entire neighborhood designed by someone who had never seen a right angle. This private tour from Bari covers the hour-long drive through the olive-tree flatlands. Then it walks you through both the tourist-facing Rione Monti and the less-visited Aia Piccola, where families still live in the trulli and laundry hangs between the cones. Inside, the rooms are surprisingly cool. The thick limestone walls act as natural insulation, and the air smells faintly of damp stone and the dried herbs hung from the low ceilings.

The rickshaw tour through Bari Vecchia takes a route that a walking tour could not manage at the same pace in July heat. The three-wheeled vehicle threads through the old quarter's lanes, many barely wider than the rickshaw itself, past the doorstep pasta makers, the small shrines to San Nicola set into the walls, and the Norman-era archways that frame glimpses of the harbor. The tour includes entry to one or two of Bari's smaller museums, typically the Museo del Succorpo della Cattedrale beneath the cathedral or the archaeological collection in the Castello Svevo. The thick medieval walls keep the galleries noticeably cooler than the streets outside. The guide narrates in a conversational style that leans heavily on local anecdotes rather than textbook history. The rickshaw's open sides let you hear the neighborhood sounds: someone practicing accordion, a radio playing from a kitchen window, the rhythmic slap of dough being folded.

This day trip pairs Alberobello with Matera, two UNESCO sites separated by about an hour of driving through the Murgia plateau, a landscape of scrubby maquis, limestone outcrops, and raptor-circled gorges. Alberobello's trulli are architecturally strange but cheerful. Matera's sassi are something else entirely, a city carved into the walls of a ravine, abandoned as uninhabitable in the 1950s and now restored into one of the most atmospheric townscapes in southern Italy. You descend through the Sasso Barisano and Sasso Caveoso neighborhoods, where cave dwellings have been converted into restaurants and hotels, the interiors still showing the raw tufa walls and the channels cut for rainwater collection. The temperature inside these cave rooms drops sharply. The stone exhales a cool, mineral-scented air that makes each doorway feel like stepping into a cellar. Combining both sites from Bari in a single day is logistically tight but workable. The contrast between the two, one whimsical and one austere, makes each more striking.

The home cooking class takes place in the apartment of a Barese home cook, one of the Cesarine network's vetted local hosts. It begins not in the kitchen but at the neighborhood market, where you select the ingredients together. In July, that means glossy purple eggplants, tomatoes still warm from the crate, tight bundles of wild chicory, and whatever the morning's catch produced at the fish market on Molo San Nicola. The fishmongers shout over each other. The concrete floor is slick with ice melt and brine. Back in the kitchen, you learn the hand-roll technique for orecchiette, the signature pasta of Bari, dragging small pieces of dough across a wooden board with a butter knife until they curl into the ear-shaped cups that trap the sauce. The meal you cook, typically orecchiette with cime di rapa or a seafood variation, focaccia barese with tomatoes and olives pressed into the oily dough, and a secondo of grilled fish, becomes lunch. You eat at the host's table, often on a balcony overlooking the rooftops of the old city, with local wine poured freely.