Conversano

Lia found Conversano first, actually, scrolling through some regional food blog looking for burrata producers, and she read me the name over breakfast with the particular satisfaction she gets when she’s found somewhere I haven’t heard of. I hadn’t. That alone made me want to go. We drove up from the coast one Tuesday morning, through a landscape of drystone walls stitching together olive groves and almond orchards, the kind of countryside that looks unplanned but is in fact centuries of careful subdivision, until the town appeared on its hilltop with the castle first — a blocky, fortified thing that has been a Norman keep, an Aragonese residence, and is now a museum, all without losing its air of mild suspicion toward visitors.

The old town wraps around the castle in the tight, defensible spiral typical of the Terra di Bari’s inland hill towns, and it took us maybe forty minutes to walk the whole thing, but we spent three hours there because every third alley produced something worth stopping for — a shrine to a saint we didn’t recognize, an old man setting out crates of small hard pears, a bakery selling taralli still warm enough to fog the cellophane bag.

What actually justified the detour, though, was lunch. A masseria maybe fifteen minutes outside town, converted just enough to serve guests without losing its working character — chickens audible from the dining terrace, a row of olive presses that still run in season stacked against one wall like retired machinery nobody had the heart to remove. We ate burrata that had been made that morning, orecchiette with a sauce of tomato and horse meat (a Bari specialty I approached with more hesitation than it deserved), and a bottle of local rosé that the owner poured himself while explaining, unprompted and at length, why Conversano’s cheese was better than Alberobello’s. I have no way to adjudicate that claim. I believed him anyway.

The town also has a minor claim to musical history — it hosted one of Italy’s earliest music conservatories for orphaned girls, back in the eighteenth century, and there’s a faded plaque about it near the cathedral that most people walk straight past. Lia read the whole thing out loud while I tried to find shade. It’s that kind of place: layered, undersold, entirely unbothered by whether you notice.

When to go: April through June or September through October, when the almond orchards and countryside are at their best and the masserie restaurants are serving from their own gardens. Avoid the deep summer midday heat if you’re walking the hill town — there’s very little shade in the upper streets.