Fasano

I will admit the Zoosafari is what got us to Fasano in the first place — Lia’s nephew was visiting from Lyon and a safari park where you drive your own rental car past lions felt like exactly the kind of unserious detour a ten-year-old deserves. It delivered on that promise almost too well: giraffes leaning into the road, a pride of lions dozing twenty feet from the windshield, baboons that opened the car’s side mirror out of pure curiosity while we sat there laughing and slightly nervous. It is not subtle and it is not meant to be, and after a week of contemplative hilltop villages it was, honestly, a relief.

What we did not expect was the old town. Fasano’s centro storico, tucked behind the modern sprawl that surrounds the highway exit, turned out to be a genuinely handsome maze of Baroque churches and narrow lanes, largely empty of other visitors because everyone else was heading straight to the safari park or the beach clubs at Savelletri down the coast. The Chiesa Matrice’s facade caught the late sun while we wandered, and an old man selling taralli from a cart outside gave the nephew a free bag “for the lions,” which made no logical sense and delighted him anyway.

The real discovery, though, was the Selva di Fasano, a wooded plateau above the town scattered with trulli that predate even Alberobello’s — some of the oldest documented trulli in the region are here, tucked into pine woods rather than displayed on a hillside for tour groups. We found a cluster near Pezze di Greco, quiet and half-overgrown, with nobody selling anything, and it felt like discovering the trulli phenomenon before it became a phenomenon at all.

We ended the day at a beach club near Savelletri with the kind of dinner that only makes sense in Puglia — raw sea urchin, a whole grilled fish, a carafe of local white — the sea a few metres away and still warm enough in September to justify the swim we took before the food arrived. Fasano, it turns out, is not one thing. It’s four or five different days out disguised as a single town.

When to go: Spring through October covers everything — the Zoosafari and old town year-round, the Savelletri beach clubs from May to September. Early morning is best for the safari park, before the animals retreat from the midday heat.