Two towns, one branch railway between them, and how to reserve an eight night trip to the Apulian heel

Lecce for four nights, Otranto for four, and about 45 kilometers of flat limestone between them. You could reserve an eight night trip to the Apulian heel yourself, and the first section of this page says so before it says anything else. What we would still be doing is reading two sets of cancellation terms and holding the file.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

There is no door here that needs opening for you

Straight out, before the pictures do any work: you could arrange all of this yourself. On the four step scale this catalog sorts by, this week sits on the first step, and that is the step where we tell you to keep your money. There are two beds to reserve, one small car to hire, and a branch railway whose timetable is published. Both houses answer email in English inside a day or two. Nothing here needs an introduction from anybody, and nobody is holding anything back from you.

So what would we be doing. Two houses means two deposit rules and two cancellation windows, which we read and set side by side on one sheet, so you can see which one hurts if April goes wrong. One file rather than two threads. And when a room moves, one message in Italian sent at an hour when someone is at a desk in Lecce, not at eleven at night in Kansas City. That is the whole of it. If you enjoy this part, keep it. There are weeks further along in the catalog where the answer is different, and we will say so there too.

Flat limestone, dead olives, and forty five kilometers

The heel is flat. The ground never gets far above 150 meters, so what you notice is not height but surface: limestone under a thin red soil, dry stone walls stacked without mortar, and fig trees growing out of the joins.

The olives are the part nobody mentions. A bacterium carried by a sap sucking insect turned up near the west coast in 2013 and has since killed olive trees across the peninsula in the millions. Whole groves stand as gray skeletons with split trunks; some plots have been cleared and replanted with varieties that tolerate it, others left as they fell. It is a working landscape in the middle of a slow disaster, and it is fair to know that before you drive 40 kilometers through it.

The towns are about 45 kilometers apart, near fifty minutes by car on the inland road. The branch railway takes an hour and a quarter to an hour and forty, usually with a change at Maglie, a handful of departures a day and fewer on Sundays. South of Otranto the coast turns to cliff and switchback for 20 kilometers. North of it there are two brackish lakes and pine behind the sand.

Lecce, and what four nights there consist of

Lecce holds about ninety five thousand people, and the walled part you will walk is roughly a kilometer across, paved in stone that four centuries of feet have polished slick. The local limestone comes out of the ground soft enough to cut with a knife and hardens in the air, which is why the seventeenth century carving goes so deep. The front of the basilica off the main street, finished in 1646, is a wall of fruit, beasts and figures around a rose window; you can stand under it for twenty minutes and keep finding things.

Under the main square, four or five meters below the paving, sits a Roman amphitheatre with about a third of it dug out and the rest still under the buildings. It held something in the order of twenty thousand. A smaller Roman theater hides three streets away.

The days have a shape imposed on them. Shops and most churches shut from about half past one until five, dinner starts at half past eight, and the squares fill after that. A combined ticket for several churches runs near eleven euro. Breakfast is a small shortcrust pastry filled with custard, from a town twenty kilometers south, about a euro sixty at the counter.

Otranto, the mosaic floor and the road south

Otranto has about five thousand seven hundred residents and an old town you cross in five minutes. The cathedral floor is the reason people come: a mosaic laid between 1163 and 1165 by a local priest, running the length of nave and aisles, a tree of life with elephants at the root and, worked into the branches, the labours of the months, Alexander the Great and King Arthur, of all people. It is under your shoes and nobody stops you walking on it. In a chapel behind the altar are the bones of roughly eight hundred townspeople killed after the siege of 1480, stacked in glass wall to wall. The two things stand ten meters apart.

Four nights is more than the streets need, which is the point. Five kilometers south, up a road that gives up its tarmac near the end, is the easternmost point of the country and its lighthouse; on a clear morning the mountains across seventy kilometers of water stand up in full. Two kilometers out is a worked out bauxite pit, red walls around a small green pond, quarried until 1976, fenced off and reopened more than once, so check on the day. The cliff road south runs past sulfur springs to a fishing town in a cove.

Months, money, and who this week is wrong for

The figure is from $2,190 per person across the eight nights. It covers both beds with whatever breakfast each house serves, and the road transfer from the airport at Brindisi into Lecce on the first day. It does not cover your own flights, the car for the second half, lunches, dinners, the church ticket or fuel. A small hire car in shoulder season runs 35 to 45 euro a day, and fuel sits near one euro eighty a litre. The final figure is confirmed when both houses confirm, and nothing is reserved until you have seen the new number.

Months, plainly. May sits at 23 or 24 degrees. July and August run 31 to 33 with humidity off the sea and the old towns full from six in the evening. Late September into early October holds 25 to 27, with the water near 24. November and December are the wet months. January days are around 14 and much of the coast is shut.

It suits adults who will drive walled lanes, eat at half past eight and walk on uneven stone. It does not suit anyone who wants a lounger and a lido for a week, anyone who needs level ground, or anyone who wants a new town every night. That last one is a different shortlist and we will point you at it.