The road to Cisternino cuts through a pretty landscape: dry stone walls separate fields interspersed with almond, holm oak and carob. Some of these divisions date back to feudal times between the town of Alberobello and here. At first glance, if it wasn't for the trulli - conical stone dwellings with mystical signs on their roofs - this could almost be the Yorkshire Dales. The low-lying Murgia hills descend imperceptibly through all this towards the Adriatic, where acres of olives meet the sea.
Mass tourism has never reached this far. When Campania and Sicily were invaded by writers, artists and poets from western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Apulia, with its simple uncemented trulli that cost nothing to build except manual labour, was overlooked. In more recent times, package holiday Italy came and went elsewhere, but it has never featured much on this coast. So it is a natural choice for agriturismo, buzzword of the thinking traveller. But it's only a name, after all. You can imagine the contadini laughing behind their bruschette about this, wondering what all the fuss is about: 'We've always been green - what do we have to do now!'
Life in Apulia rolls quietly and self-sufficiently on. This year more country houses are opening their gates to paying guests. B&B is still a fairly recent phenomenon in Italy. Dispel all thoughts of queasy breakfasts and suspect floral sheets that this most cosily nostalgic of English abbreviations brings to mind. Standards are likely to be very high.
I stayed at Il Frantoio, a sixteenth-century country estate owned by the Balestrazzi family, situated between Cisternino and the medieval city of Ostuni in the Itria Valley. The excellent Caffelletto 2000 , a guide to high quality B&Bs, bills this as a masseria pugliese - a type of fortified manor built to accommodate the entire rural hierarchy from landowner to workers' families. My room consisted mostly of vaulted ceiling shaped like a cleric's hat that peaked at 20ft. Lower down was an antique day bed, cut-embroidered white linen drapes and next door, a library of rare books. I was ready to take up permanent residence.
The finest organic olive oil is still produced here in an ancient underground oil mill - the house was built over a cave. Oleasters, wild olive trees some 4,500 years old, occupy the fields like twisted, pot-bellied Dickensian figures. Gouged, split and weathered over the centuries, they hardly seem capable of supporting leaves, never mind a good shaking at harvest time. But these are mere saplings. Neolithic digs at nearby Torre Canne spa, also a beach, have unearthed olive stones dating back 10,000 years.
In the cave's farm shop all our supermarket organics were here, but I was in for a few surprises. Traditional Apulian cuisine is based on plants growing wild. As part of a 17-course lunch (yes) I had a salad of tiny orchids, a frittura of leaves, poppy flowers on cheese and roasted lampascioni - a type of sweet bulb eaten only in this region. In Tuscany, where it also grows, they'd turn their noses up. Dish after dish arrived. Just as I was thinking I might never need to eat again, there was a roll-call of 24 types of rosolio - a liqueur made with grain alcohol. You choose mulberry because by then the previous 23 are lost in a stupor induced by this formidable experience. Signora Balestrazzi is rumoured to have made fettucine with poison ivy once.
The logistics of all this bothered me because I tend towards takeaways. Is olive oil used in all the dishes? It was daft enough to deserve a fitting response, but I didn't expect her to faint. 'Oohh!' She clutched her face, eyes closed. 'SEHHMpre! Sempre [Always].'
The agrumeto, a walled citrus garden built surely for the sensuous revival of wilted travellers, is a potent combination of pure colour and heavy perfume. These bits of paradise feature in most of the old masserie down this way. Here, every tree seemed to be in fruit or flower or both. At night you could bottle the air. Rows of tiny candle lamps flicker along its ancient stone water channels, so that you are drawn back time and again by its seduc tiveness. I decided that this was the most beautiful place on earth, until I found the next one, and because all the previous ones lay concealed under layers of time and memory, for the moment.
I found much reminiscent of the East. Apulia's geographical position points that way - from the fastidious exoticism of the food (although, as a hopeless cook, that might just be my awed impression of it) to the hypogean dwellings on rock faces and domed architecture of the trulli, said to have originated in Mycenae around 3000BC. Go to Alberobello and you'll find a townful. You can even sleep in one. There is much else to explore in this little area. The Appian Way, the most important trading route between Rome and Constantinople, teeters to a halt on the coast at nearby Brindisi. This and the Via Traiana, route of kings, saints, merchants, pilgrims and warriors, dwindled at the other extreme in the Vallo Adriano, on the borders of present-day Scotland.
To be successful, green tourism necessitates a willingness to continuity. A visible thread runs through everything here, from centuries-old recipes made with plants growing wild to the cordiality of the people. Introducing tourists to a traditional way of life is nothing new, but Apulia seems to make no concessions to the outside, and does it with ridiculous ease. So step lightly - apart from anything else you could be treading on tonight's dinner.
Getting there
Alitalia (0870 566 6666) fly to Brindisi from Heathrow and Gatwick via Milan or Rome: fares from £259.
Il Frantoio (00 39 0831 330276, email arbales@tin.it) from £60 night dinner, B&B per person.
Caffelletto 2000 Stanfords (020 7836 1321)
Agriturist. Email: agrituri@gol.grosseto.it
