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Puglia's regional capital sits on a heel of land jutting into the Adriatic, and the sea shapes almost everything about it: the light, the diet, the temperament of the streets. Bari is a working port city that has never needed to perform for visitors, which is precisely what makes it worth paying attention to. The old town, known as Bari Vecchia, occupies a compact limestone promontory between two harbours and is one of the most genuinely atmospheric medieval quarters in southern Italy, a tight grid of whitewashed lanes where elderly women still sit in doorways hand-rolling orecchiette on wooden boards.

The Basilica di San Nicola stands at the centre of Bari Vecchia both physically and spiritually. Completed in the twelfth century and built to house the relics of Saint Nicholas, brought from Myra in 1087, it is one of the finest examples of Apulian Romanesque architecture in existence and a pilgrimage destination for Orthodox Christians as well as Catholics. A guided tour of the basilica and its crypt gives proper context to the building's layered history, which is easy to miss if you simply wander in from the street. Nearby, Palazzo Simi offers a different kind of depth: a restored noble residence that now functions as a cultural space and archive, its guided visits revealing how Bari's merchant and aristocratic classes lived through the centuries of Spanish and Bourbon rule.