Locorotondo – Apulia’s prettiest village

About Locorotondo

Locorotondo is Puglia’s prettiest town, with a proudly conserved, easily-walkable center and a calm, laid-back atmosphere. There are no unique attractions to point out, but the town as a whole will be an unbelievable experience of traveling back to the past.

Its luminous white-washed walls and panoramic position recall Ostuni, the Citta’ Bianca. Still, in the middle of the Valle d’Itria, its location invites more comparisons with its UNESCO World Heritage Site neighbor, Alberobello.

This latter is famous for its delightful Trulli-speckled center, and yet, despite being just 8km down the road, Locorotondo chose to follow a completely different building route! There are no cone-topped cylinders here, but there is plenty of “cummerse” (typical local houses), narrow rectangular townhouses with pointed gable roofs, strangely evocative of north European, Baltic architecture.

These simple, angular buildings that predominate the center belie the town’s actual shape, which, as its name implies, is “rotund,” both horizontally (thanks to its circular street plan) and vertically (it hugs the contours of the curvaceous hill on which it sits).

The old protective walls are traced by a perimeter road offering beautiful views over the surrounding agricultural land, a quilt of vineyards, olive groves, and trulli dissected by dry-stone walls. It is no coincidence that Locorotondo is known as the “balcony of the Valle d’Itria.”

One enters a web of streets that wind indolently up to the central piazza from the two original gates. The whiteness of the cummerse is interrupted only by the occasional polychrome flash of a baroque palace or a vibrantly colored flower box. The early 19th-century Church of St. George and the Romanesque Church of the Madonna della Greca is worth a look. Still, monuments and churches are not the reason to visit Locorotondo: its charm lies in the collective whole rather than its constituent parts.

When you’ve spent an hour or so wandering the streets and are ready for lunch, try some of your “ù tridd,” Locorotondo’s specialty, a freshly made pasta incorporating pecorino cheese and finely chopped parsley cut into small pieces and cooked in a wholesome turkey broth. Washed down with a glass of Locorotondo DOC wine from the Cantina Sociale, you’ll soon be ready to continue touring the wonderful Valle d’Itria.