Casamassima

I saw a single photo of Casamassima on someone’s feed — an alley entirely blue, walls and doorframes and even parts of the cobblestones, looking more like a corner of Chefchaouen than anywhere in Puglia — and assumed it had to be a filter. It wasn’t. The Borgo Blu, the town’s old centro storico, really is painted almost entirely in shades of blue, floor to roofline, in a tradition whose origin nobody in town could explain to us with total confidence: one shopkeeper said it dated to a plague outbreak, when blue was believed to ward off disease; another insisted it was simply an aesthetic choice made by a mayor decades ago that residents kept up out of loyalty and habit. Both explanations get repeated locally with equal conviction.

Whatever the truth, the effect walking through it is disorienting in the best way — every other Pugliese old town we’d visited that month had trained our eyes to expect whitewash, and turning a corner into a lane of doorframes, window shutters, flowerpots, and even entire building facades in blue felt like stepping into a different country. Some residents lean into it with deep cobalt; others go lighter, almost turquoise; a few have painted patterns and Puglia’s traditional decorative motifs directly onto the blue in white, making each lane subtly different from the last.

We spent an hour just wandering without any destination, Lia stopping every few metres to photograph a doorway or a stairwell, and locals seemed entirely unbothered by our staring — clearly used to visitors doing exactly this, though the town gets nowhere near the crowds of Ostuni’s white old town, its more famous cousin an hour south. An elderly woman sweeping her blue front step told us, unprompted, that she repaints her section every spring, a small unglamorous ritual that keeps the whole effect from fading into something patchier and less deliberate.

We had a coffee at a bar on the edge of the Borgo Blu where the colour gives way back to ordinary stone, and I found myself already trying to describe the place to friends back home and failing to make it sound as strange and good as it actually was.

When to go: Spring is best, right after the annual repainting, when the blue is at its most saturated. The Borgo Blu is compact enough for a short detour from Bari or Conversano rather than requiring a dedicated day.