Articles > Italy: Well-Oiled in Puglia

Puglia is a kind of Saudi Arabia of olive oil; you half-expect the stuff to come welling from the cracks in the red, sandy soil. The region supplies almost half of Italy's prodigious demand but, until recently, its product was used only for blending. The spur and heel of Italy's boot, it was for a long time worn down by poverty. Yet its agricultural riches have fed a slow renaissance since the Second World War. Now Puglia's extra-virgins compete with the very fruitiest of the north.

Armando Balestrazzil looks less likely to declaim on the merits of organic olio d'oliva than on Spinoza's syllogisms or Zeno's paradox. With his bushy salt-and-pepper beard, swept back mane and the - admittedly, rather natty - mustard cord suit he was wearing, he could have been a philosophy professor, and I imagined him fitting in perfectly, say, in a little cafe around the corner from the University of Turin. Yet he is a hotelier, who gave up a high-ranking business career 15 years ago to establish Il Frantoio, a farm and up-scale inn near the town of Ostuni.

The wind heralded Il Frantoio to us with the subtle smell of burning olive branches, the harvest's detritus, as we walked the kilometre-long track that connects the farm, through the surrounding groves, with the road. Armando and his partner in life and livelihood, Rosalba Ciannamea, laid out varieties of their oils before us as we grilled nicely al fresco under the mid-afternoon sun. We either drizzled (the word on every epicure's tongue these days; it could lose its flavour) their wares on local pane de sedore, "bread of hardship", or sampled them straight in little shot glasses.

The several oil experts in our party preferred the latter method. One of these connoisseurs showed me how to coax the fullest aroma from the liquid before tasting it. He poured himself a half-inch of Olio delle Pendici, a first-harvest organic variety, curled his fingers around the base of the glass and then rotated them rapidly back and forth, thus warming the oil and releasing its full bouquet.

Another of the oil men could have been at a wine tasting. He took a sip of the Tre Colline blend - dominated by the sweet oil from the fruit of the ogliarola salentina trees, which thrive in the surrounding, iron-and-limestone-rich soil - let it pool on his palate and then, with vigorous sucking sounds, drew in a stream of air over it, thus amplifying the oleaginous symphony of flavour notes. He and his fellow cognoscenti swirled, sniffed, sipped and eventually, with thoughtful "hmms", gave the green-hued liquids their approbation.

Our taste buds oiled, we journeyed on to the town of Alberobello to inspect the mysterious, conical trulli houses and immerse ourselves more fully in Puglian cuisine. I had thought, along the lines of "Bella Vista" and such like innocuous names, that "Alberobello" must mean "beautiful tree". No, said Anna, our guide; my mistake was common enough but it was closer to the Latin and meant, more startlingly, "tree of war" - "bello", not as in "ciao, bello!", but "bellicose". The origin of the name is ancient and obscure, like that of the curious dwellings for which the town is famous.

Although the oldest remaining trulli were built no more than two or three centuries ago, their peculiar construction remains a matter for speculation. Their squat, conical shape lends them a fairytale appearance but was probably entirely practical. Built without mortar, their roofs just concentric rows of grey slate, they were, according to one popular theory, like Portakabins of their day, designed to be easy to pull down - and later put up again - on news that the king's revenue-collecting henchmen were in the vicinity. Their clandestine purpose, and the illiteracy of their impoverished tenants, unable to leave a written record, would help to explain their mystery.

No doubt their builders did not intend them to last the years, but many of the trulli are still inhabited. The families who dwell in them keep the whitewash fresh and in some cases renew the bold pagan, Christian and astrological symbols splashed on the roofs.

In its stimulation of the senses and excitation of the stomach, sightseeing, perhaps especially in Italy, often feels like an entree to a meal. We left our meandering among the trulli for a nearby restaurant, the Trullo d'Oro. In La Grande Bouffe, Marco Ferreri's great film of 1973, the characters resolve to eat themselves to death in one last, fabulous feast. I have often thought it would be a good way to go and, at the Trullo d'Oro's multi-course lunch that afternoon, I almost went.

Puglian food is among the most simple of Italy's regional cuisines - simple but not Spartan. Buttery, chewy little fried black olives introduced the lunch. Fried green peppers followed - silkily soft and melting on the tongue - and then, in quick succession, burrata, a mozarella-ish cheese floating like a jellyfish in its preservative liquid, and zucchini, also fried. The vegetable selection, I was told, varied according to the best on offer at the morning market.

I was getting into the swing - as were the plates, dizzyingly, around the table. Next were grilled - for a change - eggplant and wild mushrooms (the latter compact flavour bombs to make the diner swoon), then potato-topped foccacia, trippa (tripe, and not, to my taste, much improved by the Italian translation), more mushrooms (smoked this time) and fritella, fried dough-balls. "Oh", I thought, in the subsequent pause, with another sluice of the frisky rose, "I hadn't known this was to be a buffet."

It wasn't. It was the first course; or not even that, strictly speaking, but stuzzichini, "stimulants". The real primo came next: generous dollops of homemade, ear-shaped orecchiette pasta - the regional marque - in a fresh-tomato, zucchini and sausage sauce. The secundo was a mixed, unadorned grill of lamb steaks, thin salsiccie sausages and morsels of veal wrapped in pancetta; roast potatoes and a green salad were on the side. Cleaning a bone, Anna, the diminutive guide, said, "I like the meat course best," before asking the waiter to replenish the platter for the second time.

Desert was a great icy mound of fruit. Biscuits and chocolates followed, just in case, before the coffee.

I would say it was a meal fit for a king only I suspect Italian kings ate even more magnificently. Frederick II, for example, the 13th-century Swabian emperor, was certainly not given to restraint. His imprint in Puglia has been the most profound of all its monarchs; monuments to his rule litter the landscape.

He stands out, too, as an exemplar of the simultaneous sophistication and depravity of which potentates are capable. On the one hand, he was a keen "scientist", avant la lettre; particularly fascinated by zoology, he studied crossbreeding, would scrutinise birds hatching and wrote a treatise on falconry. He was a great collector of art and antiquities. His travelling court was a magnet for scholars of the day, and he encouraged the widest debate. A friend of Islam, he permitted Muslim prayer in his Sicilian domain.

On the other hand, he was prey to a terrible jealousy. He was married three times, one of his wives being Isabel of England, who died in childbirth in 1241. But he, rather than natural causes, may have been the death of some of his other wives and lovers: constantly suspecting them of infidelity, he is thought to have poisoned them. Legend has it that, in a desperate bid to allay his suspicion, one wife, Bianca Lancia, cut off her breasts and presented them to him on a silver tray with his newborn son.

Frederick had castles built all over Puglia but less to suit his peripateticism than as a reminder of his power. He probably never saw his most famous relic, the Castel del Monte, but that should not stop the visitor doing so. Like the trulli, it is highly distinctive and enigmatic. Numerous theories, from the metaphysical to the divine, have been put forward to explain its octagonal shape, and the ruling, octagonal motif of its design; one explanation is that it was built to mirror the traditional image of Jerusalem. After centuries of dilapidation, it has been fully restored and once again fulfils what must have been part of the original brief: to awe.

Frederick's riches are in the past but Puglia is forging new ones - not least, in the kitchen. Yet its rebirth has gone curiously unnoticed. One evening, walking through Bari, the regional capital, from where we made our sorties, I suddenly felt extremely conspicuous. At first, I put it down to traveller's paranoia but then, looking around again, I realised that everyone else, and I mean everyone, was Italian. This was Italy, and there were no tourists.

A version of this article first appeared on Guardian Unlimited.

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