JOURNEY TO NOSTOS

Week 7 — Puglia
The heel of Italy, where the Adriatic becomes a Greek-facing sea

Route
Bari → (coastal/old-town hinge) → Brindisi → Otranto → Lecce base → Gallipoli / Santa Maria di Leuca → Taranto handoff

7 days • 2–3 bases • threshold week • coast-and-colony logic

At a glance
Bases
Bari (1) • Lecce (3) • Salento coast (2) • Taranto area (1) (adjust to your exact overnights)

Hellenic anchors
Taras (Taranto) • Messapian + Greek contact zones • the Adriatic as corridor • the “other shore” feeling (Epirus / Corfu implied)

How to use this week
Begin anywhere. Puglia is a week of orientation: the feeling of Italy turning toward Greece. Keep it slow. The point is not to “do Puglia,” but to let the heel of the peninsula teach you how coastlines become corridors—how languages, cults, and habits move along water.

Prologue — The Peninsula Turns Its Face East

Puglia is where Italy begins to look outward.

Not outward to the Atlantic imagination, but outward to the familiar sea-road—the Adriatic, the Ionian, the straits, the stepping-stone harbours. You feel it in the wind first: a different insistence, a salt that seems to carry other coastlines in it. This is the heel of the peninsula, where the map narrows and points, and where the old world learned—again and again—that water is not a boundary but a route.

The Hellenic story here is not always written in spectacular temples the way it is in Sicily. It is written in contact: Greek city-states and colonies nearby; Messapian ground beneath; Roman overlays; Byzantine echoes; the long habit of looking across to another shore and understanding that “elsewhere” is close enough to matter.

This week is built as a slow coastal braid: old towns, headlands, port light, and the feeling of being pulled toward Greece—without crossing yet.

Route logic
Short drives • repeat bases • one major focus per day • harbour walks at dusk • restraint rewarded

Day by day

Day 1 — Bari (arrival posture)
Overnight: Bari

Focus
A port city introduction: lanes, sea-wall, and the daily rhythm of departure.

Hellenic layer
Bari’s significance is not “Greek ruins,” but sea logic: the Adriatic as a civil corridor, where trade and movement normalise difference.

Do one thing properly
Old-town walk + waterfront loop at dusk. One long sit. Stop early.

Day 2 — Bari → Brindisi (the harbour hinge)
Overnight: Brindisi

Focus
A harbour built for passage: the feeling of routes, not monuments.

Hellenic layer
This is the coastal infrastructure side of the Hellenic world: ports as the grammar of movement—waiting, weather, contracts, departures, arrivals.

Do one thing properly
One harbour orientation loop, slowly. Watch ferries and working boats. Let the place speak in its ordinary cadence.

Day 3 — Brindisi → Otranto → Lecce
Overnight: Lecce

Focus
The narrow end of Salento: the coast sharpens, the sea becomes a seam.

Hellenic layer
Otranto sits at the edge where the Adriatic begins to think like Greece—this is the “near shore” feeling, where the other side is not fantasy but geography.

Do one thing properly
One contained old-town circuit in Otranto, then move on. Arrive Lecce with time for an evening walk and a quiet meal.

Day 4 — Lecce (slow day)
Overnight: Lecce

Focus
A stillness day in a city that holds its layers without shouting.

Hellenic layer
The Hellenic world is not only temples and colonies; it is also civic form: streets that organise life, public space, repeated rituals of daily living.

Do one thing properly
One long walk through Lecce’s core at a different hour than yesterday. One café hour. Nothing else ambitious.

Day 5 — Salento coast day: Gallipoli (or one coastal town only)
Overnight: Lecce (or Salento coast)

Focus
Choose one coast and do it properly.

Hellenic layer
Coastal towns are continuity zones: labour, season, ritual, and the slow intelligence of living with water.

Do one thing properly
Pick one coastal town (Gallipoli works) and commit: long sea-edge walk + contained old-quarter loop + sitting time. No stacking.

Day 6 — Santa Maria di Leuca (the “two seas” feeling)
Overnight: Salento coast (or Lecce)

Focus
The end of the heel: headland light, water meeting water, the sensation of a hinge.

Hellenic layer
Cape logic matters in the Hellenic world. Headlands are navigational markers and psychological thresholds—places where sailors recalibrate, offer prayers, and decide when to cross.

Do one thing properly
One headland walk at late afternoon. One long sit watching the surface change. Then stop.

Day 7 — Toward Taranto (Taras) handoff
Overnight: Taranto area

Focus
Arrive into the Greek name—Taras—without turning it into a sprint.

Hellenic layer
Taras is the explicit Greek anchor of this region: a Greek city in Italy that makes the “eastward face” of Puglia historically concrete.

Do one thing properly
Arrive with daylight for one harbour/sea-front orientation walk. Leave the deep Taras work for the next week’s opening posture.

Navigation
← Previous Week — Sicily
Next Week → Greece restart: the Hellespont / Dardanelles to Ionia (Week 8)
Back to Italy — Weeks 5–7

Optional: the long-form read
Want the full narrative?
The long-form manuscript treats Puglia as a threshold landscape—Italy turning toward Greece—where the Hellenic world is felt in sea-corridor logic, contact zones, and the approach to Taras. (Paid)