Where to Stay in Bari, Puglia

What is Bari known for?

Bari is the port capital of Puglia and the city of Saint Nicholas. Sailors brought the saint's bones from Myra in 1087, and the Basilica of Saint Nicholas has drawn Orthodox and Catholic pilgrims down the same lanes ever since. Ferries leave for Greece and Albania.

Women roll orecchiette on tables put out in the street of Bari Vecchia, and the Murat grid behind the old town runs on shopping streets and coffee.

What are the main landmarks in Bari?

Bari keeps its monuments on the headland. The Basilica of Saint Nicholas, raised over the stolen relics in the eleventh century, set the pattern every Puglian Romanesque church copied afterwards. The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta stands a few streets away.

Castello Normanno-Svevo guards the landward side, rebuilt by Frederick II and later held by Bona Sforza, and the Museo archeologico di Santa Scolastica sits on the seaward wall above the port. Teatro Margherita stands on piles in the water.

What is the history of Bari?

Bari began as Barium, a Peucetian harbour on the Adriatic that the Romans took over. Byzantium made it the seat of the catapan who governed southern Italy, and for two centuries the orders for Apulia and Calabria went out from this rock. Then sailors changed everything.

In 1087 a crew from Bari carried the bones of Saint Nicholas out of Myra, and the basilica built to hold them turned a trading port into a shrine that Rome and Constantinople both honoured. The Normans took the city, and William the Bad levelled it in 1156. Frederick II rebuilt the castle.

Bona Sforza, duchess of Bari and queen of Poland, held the city in the sixteenth century and lies under a marble monument in the Basilica of Saint Nicholas. Joachim Murat ordered a new town in 1813, and the straight streets below the old walls gave Bari its shops and its theatres. War found the port in 1943, when a German raid on the harbour sank the ships and released the mustard gas one of them carried.

The ferries and the fairs came back.

Where is Bari?

Bari lies on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, on a low limestone shelf below the Murge. No river reaches the sea here. Rain sinks into the karst and runs underground, which is why the plain behind the city carries olive groves and vines rather than water meadows, and why the coast is rock instead of sand.

The old town stands on a blunt headland between two harbours, with the working port to the north and the fishing basin to the south. Alta Murgia rises inland.

What is the climate of Bari?

Bari lives off the Adriatic in every season. Summer is long, dry and bright, and the sea breeze that comes up in the afternoon is the only relief on the seafront. Winter is mild but raw when the north wind crosses the Adriatic from the Balkans and pushes the waves over Lungomare Nazario Sauro.

Snow is a rumour. The scirocco arrives from Africa in spring and autumn, hauling warm grit up from the sea and greying the limestone.

How do you get to Bari?

Bari sits on the Adriatic main line between Bologna and Lecce. Fast trains run down the coast to Bari Centrale, the regional lines of the Ferrovie Appulo Lucane climb inland toward Matera, and a shuttle service links the station to Bari Karol Wojtyła airport at Palese. The port does the rest.

Ferries cross to Igoumenitsa and Patras in Greece, to Durrës in Albania and to Dubrovnik, and the terminal sits within sight of the old town. The A14 autostrada runs past on its way to Taranto.