Seven days in Puglia by car, from Bari

Seven days by road from Bari, with the first appointment fixed before anything else: Castel del Monte admits 120² people per time slot and holds you to 45 minutes inside.

Bari, the car, and the rule that costs money

Bari Karol Wojtyla handled 7,977,881¹ passengers in 2025, up 9.7% on 2024, tenth in Italy, and it is where this route starts. The rental desks are there and the road network fans out south from it.

Before the first town, the rule that catches drivers: the historic center of an Italian art city is almost always a limited traffic zone, entered only by authorized vehicles in defined hours, watched by cameras that read every plate, with the penalty issued automatically to anyone passing without a registered permit. Nothing stops you at the boundary.

With a rental car the sequence has an extra step, because the company charges an administrative fee for handing over your details and that charge often arrives before the fine does. Park outside the walls. Prices in this section are in euros.

Day 1: Castel del Monte, 120 people and 45 minutes

Castel del Monte opens 9:00 am to 5:45 pm from October 1 to March 31, with last entry at 5:00 pm, and 10:00 am to 6:45 pm from April 1 to September 30, with last entry at 6:00 pm, closed December 25 and January 1.

Entry is capped at 120² people per time band and the visit is limited to 45 minutes. That is the least publicized and most useful thing to know about this building, and in summer it means buying online rather than driving up hopefully.

The ticket is €9 full and €2 reduced, or €12 and €3 combined with the castle at Trani. A Puglia Musei Card at €20 covers every site of the regional state museums directorate for six months, with the Mattinata museum and the Castello Carlo V in Lecce excluded.

Days 2 to 4: Alberobello, and 1,500 roofs on 10 hectares

The trulli of Alberobello were listed in 1996 under criteria (iii), (iv) and (v), across 10.52⁴ hectares in the Rione Monti and Rione Aia Piccola districts, taking in over 1,500⁴ buildings. The technique is dry stone with limestone chiancarelle, no mortar, a double wall with a loose core and buried cisterns to collect rainwater.

The town expanded after 1620⁴, though trulli in Rione Monti date from the mid 16th century, and construction of new ones fell away after 1797⁴, when Ferdinand IV granted Alberobello the status of royal town. Parts of the settlement were declared national monuments between 1909 and 1936.

The Trullo Sovrano is a €2.50 single ticket, open 10:00 am to 12:45 pm and 3:30 pm to 6:00 pm from November to March and 10:00 am to 12:45 pm and 3:30 pm to 6:30 pm from April to October. It keeps a midday closure that the shop trulli of Rione Monti do not, which is the classic way to arrive at a locked door.

Day 5: Castellana, 122 meters down

The Castellana caves run 3,348⁶ m and reach 122⁶ m below the surface at a constant 16.5⁶ degrees, on a partial route of 1 km in 50 minutes or a full route of 3 km in 100 min⁶utes that includes the Grotta Bianca.

The visit itself descends to about 70 m. Franco Anelli found the system on January 23, 1938 through the Grave, the collapse doline that still forms the entrance, and the site is 1.5 km from the center of Castellana Grotte.

We do not publish 2026 prices here because the operator does not publish them either: the ticket page redirects to an online box office and the alternative pages return errors.

Days 6 and 7: south into the Salento

Two nights at the southern end of the route gives you the baroque towns and the two seas without a daily drive back north. The distances are short and the summer traffic is not.

Every one of these centers restricts vehicle access on the same camera and plate model described above, verified by the city councils of Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples and Bologna. Assume any Puglian old town works the same way until you have checked, and use the paid lots on the ring roads.

For the region as a whole, see Puglia.

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