By Giovanna Dell'Orto

updated 7:33 p.m. ET April 27, 2007

POLIGNANO A MARE, Italy - Puglia has some of the brightest seas, most diverse art and architecture, most mouthwatering peasant cuisine and kindest people in all of Italy — including strangers who will go out of their way to lead you to one after another stunning beach on impossibly lapis-lazuli waters.

Puglia is the heel to Italy's boot, and after two weeks spent touring the region, I felt grateful that charter airlines don't disgorge hordes of tourists here. These are just some of the reasons:

Brilliant seas
"I said put it back, this is a natural park," a stern father told his son. He was pointing to the octopus that sat with protruding eyes on the boy's shoulders after being plucked from the crystalline waters at Natural Maritime Reserve of Torre Guaceto, just north of Brindisi.

With more than 500 miles of coast on two seas, the Adriatic and the Ionian, Puglia has all sorts of gorgeous beaches. For white limestone cliffs spotted with the deep green of gnarled pine trees, try the southernmost tip of Salento.

At opposite ends of this peninsula, I swam in the fingerlike cove of Porto Badisco, where legend has it that Italy's mythological founder, Aeneas, landed, and I dove even deeper into history at Portoselvaggio, where remains of Neanderthal men were found.

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A few miles north, it's all about sandy expanses, like Punta della Suina, where the setting sun turns the transparent water pink.

But it's Torre Guaceto that gets my gold medal — for the baby-powder white sand, the schools of silvery fish flitting from reef-like rock formations in pools of turquoise water, and the scent of pine needles drifting from the pristine forest that borders the beach.

Living history
No other image says Puglia better than the trullo, a rural home that's essentially a whitewashed teepee of small limestone slabs stacked without mortar, with a cone surmounted by pagan or religious symbols. They are scattered among olive groves and huge prickly pear cacti in the Valle d'Itria, inland in a triangle between Bari, Taranto and Brindisi.

Of unknown origin and unique to Puglia, they date at least from the Middle Ages. Most are still inhabited and more than 1,400 huddle in Alberobello. The town might feel a bit too touristy for Puglia, with its souvenir shops exhibiting plastic trulli, but it only takes a look at the clotheslines in a trullo backyard to realize that real life goes on in this primitive fairytale place.

Ivan Tortorella / AP A view of the typical "Trulli" constructions of southern Italy's Puglia region, in downtown Alberobello, near Bari, Monday April 24, 2007. Puglia has the brightest sea, the most diverse art and architecture, the most mouthwatering peasant cuisine and the kindest people in all of Italy, including strangers who will stop their cars to direct you to their favorite secret beaches. (AP Photo/Ivan Tortorella)

Farther inland is the Murge, scorched highlands grooved by canyons where, in the Middle Ages, people built cave dwellings as homes and churches when they fled from pirates.

The most famous dwellings of all are the Sassi in Matera, which is just across the state line in the Basilicata region. Below the modern town and built on the side of a steep ravine, two whole neighborhoods of single-room cave dwellings and rock-hewn, frescoed churches were inhabited first by hermits and then by families until the 1960s. While some are now trendy hotels and restaurants, they still look so authentically ancient that Mel Gibson filmed scenes here for "The Passion of the Christ."

Cities as art
Art is not a masterpiece in a museum but a whole downtown in Valle d'Itria cities like Locorotondo, or, by the coast, in Bari, Ostuni and Lecce.

Locorotondo is a round nest of a village where everything is white except for the bright splashes of red flowers that overtake its wrought-iron balconies. Ostuni is even more blinding, though a sea breeze caresses you as you hike up and down its steep inclines and marvel at the sculpted baroque portals on its whitewashed houses.

But you haven't seen Baroque in all its theatrical, indulgent, luxuriant excess until you've spent an evening among the wreaths of fruit and the pinup women sculpted on the golden limestone churches and palaces of Lecce.

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By comparison, the medieval downtown of Bari is austere, centered on the Basilica di San Nicola, built between the 10th and 12th centuries to honor its patron saint (yes, it's the real St. Nicholas, "Santa Claus").

The busy port city is trying to overcome its dangerous reputation, but the only person that chased us in the narrow alleys was a grocery store clerk with a cold bottle of water, concerned that ours had become too warm as friends and I waited for another clerk to make our sandwiches.

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