Ruvo di Puglia

I went to Ruvo di Puglia for a museum, which is not usually how I choose where to spend an afternoon, but the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Jatta had been recommended twice by people whose taste I trust, and I’m glad I listened. This small hill town in the Murge, inland from Bitonto and Molfetta, sat atop one of the richest archaeological sites in southern Italy — an ancient Peucetian and later Hellenized settlement whose necropolis has yielded thousands of extraordinary painted vases, many of them red-figure ceramics imported from or inspired by Attic Greece, dating from the sixth to the third century BC.

The Palazzo Jatta, a private nineteenth-century collection now a national museum, holds the best of what was found, including the Talos Vase — a large krater depicting the bronze giant Talos from Greek mythology, considered one of the finest examples of Apulian red-figure pottery anywhere. Standing in front of glass cases of vases this old, this intact, this beautifully painted, in a town of barely 25,000 people with no tour buses outside, gave me the same feeling I get in the better rooms of much larger, more famous museums — except here I could stand as close as I wanted for as long as I wanted without anyone behind me waiting their turn.

Above ground, the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta is another of the region’s Apulian-Romanesque cathedrals, and its rose window — tall, deeply recessed, framed by an elaborate carved arch of interlaced patterns — is genuinely one of the best I saw anywhere in Puglia, cathedral towns twice its size included. I walked the old center around it in the early evening, the streets narrow and largely empty, stopping at a small enoteca where the owner poured me a glass of a local Nero di Troia, a grape variety I associate specifically with this stretch of the Murge, dense and a little rustic, and talked to me for twenty minutes about the vases in the museum with more enthusiasm than most professional guides manage.

The town’s economy today runs mostly on olive oil and wine rather than tourism, and it shows in the pace of the place — shops close for the full riposo, cafes are patronized almost entirely by locals, and the main square fills up only in the evening, when the whole town seems to walk out simultaneously for the passeggiata. I sat on a low wall near the cathedral watching families and old couples circle the piazza and felt, again, that particular pleasure of finding a place that has not yet organized itself around visitors.

When to go: Spring and autumn for comfortable walking weather and the best light on the cathedral’s carved stone. The museum is a year-round draw regardless of season, and being indoors makes Ruvo a reasonable stop even in the height of summer heat.