The White City and a Limin' Sunday

Sunday, September 08, 2024
Monopoli, Apulia, Italy
Ostuni, about 40 km southwest of Monopoli, is known as the White City.  Saturday, we took the train and bus (the town is inland and the train runs along coast) down there for a visit.  It is a place that we tried to visit 6 years ago when we were driving around Puglia, but I couldn't find a way into the city centre in the maze of roads around it and finally gave up (no GPS).  Anyway, this time the bus took us very close to the Centro Storico and the walled, almost circular, "White City" section.  Of course, it is called the White City because all of the buildings in that section are starkly white, with only some doors painted bright colours.  It really is very spectacular from a distance and still quite impressive up close when walking around the wall, as we did.  We wandered a bit in the old town, getting a good distant look at the "White City" before taking a walk almost around the outside of the white wall and then heading up inside for some exploration.  We happened upon a neat bar where there were stairs set as chairs, with cushions and tables with only 2 legs.  
We had been almost completely alone when we circled the walls and began exploring inside, but as were sitting at the bar, it seemed like a bell had gone off and all sorts of people started streaming past, on foot and on the tour "tuk-tuks", which were the only vehicles inside the walls.  And when we left the bar and went a little farther along, to where there were a lot more bars and restaurants, closer to the main entrance to the walls (which we had avoided), the place was suddenly packed.  Anyway, it was a very neat place.  After getting our fill of pics inside the wall, we turned down a little laneway in the old town outside the wall and found a nice little restaurant, where we shared an excellent "beef roll" in a wonderful tomato sauce and a trio of burratas (burrate?).  A little time back in the main square with WiFi to figure out how to get our tickets back to Monopoli online and then we wandered back to the bus stop.  We lucked out and caught the train before the one that we were scheduled to catch and got home in no time.
Sunday, we decided to just hang around and chill or, as we say when we are in the Caribbean, to do some liming.  Of course that doesn't mean we get to sleep in.  I have mentioned all the churches visible from our place.  Well, you know what comes with churches.  Bells!  Here, they start at 7:30 usually, with various different churches chiming in about every 10 minutes until around 9:00.  Then it settles down to about once every half hour. Of course, this being Sunday, they started earlier, at 7:00.  And, as we were having our coffee and tea on the roof, we were startled when the bells of San Leonardo, right next to us and which we hadn't heard previously, blared out behind us at around 8:00.  We did do some laundry in the morning (we're not total slackers!) and wandered out to find some lunch, which turned out to be an excellent meal of a fried cod "pucce" (sandwich) and a margherita "pinsa" (flatbread) at Sottocoperta, the place with probably the best view of the harbour, that we had sort of dismissed as a tourist trap whenever we walked by.
Then a gelato on the way home for more liming and a well-deserved nap, before heading out to eat again, to Piazza Garibaldi for some peppered mussels and tempura cod bites at In Piazzetta.  We certainly have been eating well!
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