Italy's heel has more coastline than any other mainland Italian region
Apulia, or Puglia, forms both the spur and the heel of the Italian boot, and no other mainland region has a longer shoreline. People have lived here for at least 250,000 years, and Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans and Spaniards all left their mark on it before Italy unified.
The region covers 19,540.90 square kilometres of southern Italy, washed by the Adriatic to the east and the Ionian Sea and Gulf of Taranto to the south, with Bari as its capital. In the north the Gargano promontory juts into the sea; in the south the Salento peninsula stretches out as the heel. Most of the land is flat or gently hilly, topping out at Monte Cornacchia, 1,152 metres high. Summers are hot and dry, sometimes passing 40 °C in Lecce and Foggia, and the Sirocco can carry red Saharan dust across the coast.
Its oldest known inhabitant is Altamura Man, an archaic Neanderthal. By the first millennium BC the Iapygian peoples, among them the Daunians and Messapians, had settled, and Greek colonists founded cities such as Taras, today's Taranto. Rome found the region hard to take. Its army was humiliated at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC and crushed by Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC. Once subdued, Apulia prospered along the Appian Way and Via Traiana and became the leading exporter of olive oil to the East.
After Rome fell, control passed between Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Lombards; in the 9th century Saracens briefly held an emirate at Bari. The Norman William of Hauteville created a county of Apulia in 1043, and by 1130 it belonged to Roger II's Kingdom of Sicily. Frederick II later built Castel del Monte near Andria. From 1282 Naples ruled, landowners gained power, and in 1861 the region joined the new Kingdom of Italy.
Heavy emigration between 1956 and 1971 drained poorer areas before tourism reshaped the economy in the 1970s and 1980s. Food is a big draw: orecchiette and cavatelli are local pasta shapes, taralli a favourite snack, and the pasticiotto a custard-filled shortbread. There is even a melon, the carosello, that people often eat before it ripens.
Source: Apulia
