Polignano a Mare

The area has been lived in since prehistoric times. Excavations at Santa Barbara found a Neolithic settlement and a karst cave, and in the second millennium BC the arrival of the Iapygians drew villagers to the site of today's old town. Polignano is believed to stand on the ancient Greek city of Neapolis of Apulia, perhaps one of the colonies founded by Dionysius II of Syracuse in the 4th century BC, though other accounts credit Julius Caesar, and it may have been a stop on the Via Traiana. Its position on the Adriatic made it a trading town.

The Byzantines organised it as a municipality in the 6th century; the Normans boosted its olive oil production in the 11th; and the Angevins fortified it against Turkish raids. Under the Aragonese crown it reached its economic and cultural peak, and a Venetian governor lived in the old town, where the palazzo del Doge still stands. In 1529 the viceroy Pedro de Toledo ordered watchtowers along the coast, among them Torre Incina and the tower at San Vito.

Kings stopped here on the road to Lecce: Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in 1797, and Joseph Bonaparte about ten years later. The Bourbons built the bridge over Lama Monachile to carry the new royal road between Bari and Lecce, and in 1863 the town added "a Mare" to its name. In the 20th century tourism joined farming and fishing as the base of the economy.

The town's most famous son is Domenico Modugno, born here in 1928, whose 1958 song Nel blu dipinto di blu — known abroad as Volare — won the first Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. A three-metre statue by the Argentinian sculptor Hermann Mejer, unveiled in 2009, stands on the seafront promenade that bears his name, arms open, and the local hotel school is named after him.

Saint Vitus is the patron: his relics, a fragment of an arm and a kneecap, are kept in the mother church, and the hamlet and Benedictine abbey of San Vito on the coast to the north carry his name. The old town's lanes are covered with short poems written on steps, walls and doors by a local artist known as Guido the Flaneur.

Summer events have made the town known far beyond Italy. Lama Monachile has hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series from 2008 to 2010 and again since 2015, with divers dropping from platforms 20 to 27 metres high into the cove. Since 2005 the literary festival Il Libro Possibile has filled the squares and the seafront each July, and a town band with majorettes has performed since 1997.

About 17,000 people live in the municipality, which reaches from the coast inland to the edge of Conversano and Castellana Grotte, between Mola di Bari and Monopoli. The land rises from 8 metres at San Vito to 220 metres on the border with Monopoli.

The local economy rests mostly on tourism, farming and fishing. Fields around San Vito grow vegetables, olives and the carota di Polignano, a traditional local carrot also called the "bastinaca di San Vito". A marina with 316 berths opened at San Vito in June 2015. Tourism has grown fast: the town is among the most photographed places in Puglia, and in summer many visitors arrive by train from Bari for the day.

Life in the old town is lived close to the street, with houses opening onto the lanes and terraces. In the evening residents walk the seafront and the squares. The weather can turn sharply: a cloudburst in September 2006 flooded parts of the town and washed mud and debris into the sea, and a hailstorm in June 2011 damaged crops, cars and windows.

Polignano eats like the rest of the Puglia coast, from wheat, olive oil, vegetables and the sea. Its own product is the carota di Polignano, a traditional local carrot grown mainly in the fields around San Vito. Orecchiette, Puglia's "little ears" of pasta, are served most classically alle cime di rapa, with turnip tops dressed with garlic, anchovies, chilli and olive oil and finished with grated cacioricotta cheese.

Tiella, a dish of potatoes, rice, onion and mussels baked together in a round earthenware pan of the same name, is part of Apulian cooking along this coast. Snacks include panzerotti, fried turnovers that resemble small calzoni and are usually filled with tomato and mozzarella, and focaccia pugliese, which has potato in the dough and is topped with tomatoes, olives and oregano.

Most restaurants sit in the old town's lanes and on its terraces above the sea, with seafood the main draw, while the bars and gelaterias of the Lungomare Domenico Modugno fill on summer evenings.