Mattinata
"Mattinata sits with its back to the highest cliffs in Puglia and barely seems to notice them."
A whitewashed farming town below the Gargano's highest cliffs, gateway to the Baia delle Zagare and some of the peninsula's least crowded coastline.
The town under the cliffs
Mattinata is a working agricultural town first and a beach base second, which is exactly why we liked it — the streets are whitewashed and clean and largely uninterested in performing “picturesque” for visitors, the surrounding land given over to olive groves and vineyards rather than resort development, and the massif rises directly behind the rooftops in a wall of pale limestone that seems too tall for the modest town at its foot. We stayed in an agriturismo just outside town, run by a family who’d been pressing their own olive oil for three generations and gave us a bottle to take home that lasted us into the following spring.
Down to the coast
The real draw is the coastline below Mattinata, reached by a winding descent through pine forest that switches back sharply enough to make you grateful for a car with good brakes. The Baia delle Zagare is the best known stop — two crescent beaches divided by a pair of sea stacks (locally the “faraglioni”) that rise straight out of the water — and while a hotel complex controls the most direct access to part of the bay, a public stairway down through the cliff gets you to the same startling turquoise without paying for a sunbed.
Vignanotica and quieter coves
Further along, Vignanotica beach sits at the base of sheer cliffs with almost no development at all — a narrow strip of pale pebble and sand, a single seasonal beach bar, and cliffs rising so directly behind it that the beach is in shade well before the rest of the coast has lost the sun. We arrived late afternoon and had maybe a dozen other people to share it with, which on the Gargano in July felt close to miraculous.
Lia made the observation, watching the light go long and gold against the cliff face, that Mattinata felt like the version of the Gargano coast that hadn’t yet decided to become famous — and given how quickly Vieste and Peschici have filled up in the past decade, I suspect that window won’t stay open indefinitely.
When to go: June and September for the best balance of warm water and manageable crowds at the beaches below town; the cliffside descents get busy with day-trippers from Vieste and Mattinata itself in peak August, so an early morning arrival is worth the alarm clock.