Trullis are limestone circular structures, which are found throughout the fields

April 8, 1999
Web posted at: 3:39 p.m. EDT (1939 GMT)

By Joan Nathan

(Los Angeles Times Syndicate) -- Two years ago, at a roadside restaurant in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, I first came across them: Butterfield & Robinson bikers, identified by the bright B&R logos on their cycling gear. They were seated on a rooftop terrace enjoying a private luncheon. Outside on the dirt road, a van, which followed them as they rode, was waiting to take them to the next scenic site after another few hours of cycling.

"Wow, would I love to travel like that!" I told my husband, Allan.

One month ago that dream came true.

A friend asked us if we would like to join him on a B&R cycling trip to Puglia, the heel of Italy's boot and the country's flattest region. The trip would fall on the week of our anniversary, so we could hardly say no.

The brochures suggested some advanced training. Being a seasoned "foodie," I trained by looking through Nancy Harmon Jenkins' "Flavors of Puglia" (Broadway Books; 1998) and asking several Italian food writers for suggestions of places and dishes to eat. Then, after purchasing several pairs of padded spandex biking shorts, jellied seat covers to protect our posteriors, and gloves and helmets, we trained for an hour or two by taking a leisurely excursion before our adventure.

As we departed, our children laughed, sure that we would never succeed in bicycling every day for one whole week.

We arrived at San Domenico, our first hotel, located in Savelletri di Fasano, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) outside of Bari. A stunning 15th-century stone masseria or a fortified feudal farm manor, its expanse was reminiscent of a movie set fantasy, replete with a huge saltwater pool, surrounded by olive trees with gnarled roots, pomegranates in bloom, archeological excavations as well as a small health spa.

My first reaction was that this was the kind of place in which to linger, to write a book, to eat wonderful meals -- certainly not to spend eight days riding bicycles.

At our welcoming dinner that evening we sipped wine and munched on taralli , a delicious boiled and baked semolina cracker with a hole (ancestor of bagels, I thought) and enjoyed our first taste of the local fare -- sea bass with rosemary, local fruilli pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil, and a kind of almond brittle for dessert. Not bad for starters.

The next morning, we fortified ourselves on a breakfast buffet of smoked scarmozza and pecorino, a local sheep's cheese, fig-filled strudel, a mild ricotta cheesecake, a parade of fresh clementine and apricot jams, as well as delicious melons, fresh persimmons, pears and a variety of yogurt. Then came our first day of bicycling.

Fifteen of us piled into the van for a 20-minute ride, while three diehard bikers warmed up with a 50-mile (80-kilometer) jaunt. At the starting point were bikes, each marked with our names. The guides gave us a three-page sheet with "Suggested bike route for Day 1," and our combination code, 1966, the year that B&R began with a student bicycling trip in Burgundy.

Once accustomed to my bike, I was, to my surprise, instantly in heaven. The quietly undulating countryside was magical. We bicycled through 1,000-year-old olive orchards, with gnarled, anthropomorphic trunks. I felt totally in tune with this almost biblical landscape. I could heard the waves of the Adriatic Sea in the distance.

We passed nets spread out underneath the olive trees, laden with ripe fruit, almost ready for picking. I got off my bike to taste an olive -- juicy, and completely bitter. It had yet to be cured in brine.

Interspersed among the olive trees were fig trees. Although they had already borne fruit, the aroma of the fig leaves lingered in the air. And here and there were accents of prickly pear cacti with bright orange fruit and trees bearing plump red pomegranates.

At the end of our morning ride, we parked our bikes in a garage and climbed up past a cemetery to Ostuni, an ancient hill town with whitewashed limestone houses, a cathedral and a central square, where during World War II a large picture of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, adorned the side of the City Hall.

As we walked through the stone streets, we passed a man who was piping newly fermented local red wine into the houses. Not bad, I thought -- piped wine.

We lunched at the Trattoria del Frantoio Oleario, located in a cave where once they pressed olives. Platters of antipasto reminiscent of the robust flavors of Italian food from my native Providence, Rhode Island, appeared on the tables: paper-thin carrots simmered in olive oil and simply seasoned with salt; fried eggplant with sage; ricotta balls swathed in a tomato sauce; sweet uncured olives cooked in tomatoes and fried; potatoes with celery leaves and tomato served cold.

Then came our first taste of the local specialty, orecchiette, a handmade pasta shaped like an ear with the tomato sauce literally held in the ear. For dessert, we were served cake with a ricotta filling.

Bicycling through the olive groves back to our hotel, we passed an elderly couple picking verdura, wild greens, that local cooks add to their garbanzo bean stews, their pasta dishes, or even as an accompaniment to their local prosciutto.

Our second day, feeling less achy than I had anticipated, we biked straight from our masseria through fields of winter crops like fennel, cauliflower, arugula, Italian parsley and artichokes. An occasional farmer still had some summer eggplants, hot peppers and tomatoes growing.

In Puglia, a variety of large, hanging cherry tomatoes called pomodoro e pendula are pulled in the early fall from the ground still on the vine. They hang in clumps in houses through the winter, making their way fresh into sauces and salads.

We biked past an olive grower "giving his trees a haircut." He told us that as this happens every four years they bear little fruit and this replenishes them. He handed me one of the cut olive branches which, like a wreath of peace, I inserted into my helmet.

In contrast to our country-style lunch the day before, we biked to Masseria Marzalossa, an island of refinement and taste owned by the same family for the last 300 years. Next to the courtyard with a date palm in bloom, bougainvillea and a wine press with ripe prickly pears, the estate's cook, Anna Pantaleo, gave us a hands-on lesson in making orecchiette.

Deftly, she molded semolina flour and water into long strands that she scraped with a knife and then, using her second finger, she pressed into ear-shaped pasta forms. She served the results later with fresh tomatoes and basil, the last of the year. In the winter this Pugliese specialty is often served with the stir-fried verdura that we had noticed being picked along the road.

After our cooking class, we sat down to another meal of antipasto -- our first taste of stracciatelli, a mozzarella ball filled with cream; focaccia with tomatoes and pepper; stuffed peppers with pepperoni, rice, white wine, Parmesan cheese and capers; and eggplant parmigiana, all perfectly cooked.

This was another place to linger, but off we biked to our next stop, an olive oil museum. There we saw how the Greeks brought olive-making to Puglia in the 1300s. In those faraway days the olives were pressed with the aid of oxen. A far cry from the cold-pressed techniques of today.

Bicycling back to our hotel, our second guide, Hugh Huddleson, an American architect, took a detour past an early Christian cave with 12th-century frescoes, shielded from the invading Turks and other barbarians beneath the olive groves, visible from the Adriatic, almost a stone's throw away.

On Day Three it was time to move on to our second location, the hill town of Martina Franca. One of the beauties of this trip is that once our suitcases were packed, we didn't see them again until they were sitting in our room at the second hotel. Because it looked like rain, we donned shower caps beneath our bicycle helmets and put ponchos in our saddle bags. Then off we biked to trulli country, one of the curiosities of this region. Trullis are limestone circular structures, found throughout the fields that have no clearly definable origin. They dot the countryside, and seem to attest to an Asia Minor origin from across the Adriatic. Some are used to store farm goods, others give a Hollywood atmosphere to new structures.

As we were climbing a big hill into town amid a sudden downpour, the farthest bicyclists passing us, our guide Hugh arrived with the van and offered to pick us up. This was definitely my kind of roughing it.

Up on the hill in Cistercina, we continued biking through the trulli country to our luncheon stop, the stunning Osteria Cantone outside Ostuni.

At our "biking buffet" in this country restaurant inside stone vaults with wooden bowls surrounding the fireplace, we ate some extraordinary vegetable dishes with fresh ricotta, burrata, a mouth-watering mozzarella ball filled with tiny mozzarella balls and cream; cauliflower and zucchini in a bechamel sauce and the local pecorino cheese; a pasta with veal sauce and Parmesan cheese; chicory on focaccia; and two delicious desserts, a mousse of local ricotta and a chestnut cake with rum.

After lunch, we biked up to Martina Franca where each of us had a tiny apartment in the old walled city at a hotel complex called the Villaggio Inn. That night, our anniversary, the entire group dined at the hotel where we tasted a stunning fava puree with roasted peppers, a local Pugliese treasure. A pianist and a saxophonist played old American and Italian songs, while we all danced.

Day Four was Market Day in Martina Franca. At the food market, we tasted figs that were dried in the sun, filled with toasted almonds and fennel seeds and then layered with an occasional bay leaf. Leisurely, we biked together through trulli countryside to Locorotondo, an immaculate hilltop town just a few miles away.

We dined that evening at Al Fornello, near Ceglie Messapico, a restaurant that had been suggested by several food writers. It was well worth the taxi ride for Dora, the chef, and her husband, Angelo Ricci, and the delicate food -- fried ricotta balls; cabbage stuffed with cheese and wine; fried beets; roasted eggplant; puffed wheat and garbanzo beans; pasta with basil and tomatoes; raw mushrooms with shaved Parmesan cheese; roast lamb and potatoes; fried pieces of dough with raspberry sauce; and Champagne, Pugliese wine and limoncello, the local liqueur.

For four more sun-filled days we explored the back roads of Puglia, excavations of ancient sites, always peddling and sampling the local foods and wines.

On the last day, we hiked to a masseria where we had a mozzarella demonstration, including burrata, an amazing Pugliese version with tiny mozzarella balls and cream encased in one large mozzarella. By now, our 28-kilometer (18-mile) ride back was a piece of cake. In fact, my husband and I slowed down to savor this last ride, to let those gnarled olive trees seep into our beings before returning to our everyday hectic reality.

To mark our last turn, one not easily seen from the road, Hugh crafted two large arrows out of local Italian candy bars appropriately called in English, "Hurry Up and Get Up."

Our final night, we tasted Pugliese wines at our last home, Il Melograno, a Relais and Chateau hotel, just outside Monopoli. At the farewell dinner we all captioned candid photographs taken by Hugh throughout the week. Unbeknownst to me, he had taken one with the olive branch above my helmet. The appropriate caption read, "Food writer with olive branch halo, Puglia style."

Butterfield & Robinson prices this trip according to the season. At press time, several season prices had not yet been set. The April 18 to 25, April 25 to May 2 and May 12 to 18 trips cost $3,750 per person with a single supplement of $300.

The May 14 to 21, May 25 to 31 are yet to be priced. The May 28 to June 4, September 15 to 22, September 26 to October 3, September 29 to October 6, October 13 to 20, October 20 to 27 are yet to be priced. The September 18 to 24 and October 11 to 17 are $3,250 per person with a single supplement of $275.

Contact: Butterfield & Robinson, 70 Bond St., Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 1X3; tel. (416) 864-1354 or (800) 678-1147; Web site www.butterfield.com.

Copyright © 1999, Joan Nathan
Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate