D48 Minervinho to Rivo di Puglia

What a lovely couple of nights in Minervinho - the unsung balcony of Puglia. In the park on the top of the hill the cafes start filling up a couple of hours before sunset when the most extraordinary light show  commences as the wind turbines sitting in the windy rolling landscape below light up. All helped by a brilliant soundtrack laid out on by a cool dude whose photo was taken too late in evening to sadly show anything! Italian pop feels pretty good at this moment and I'm.beginning to recognise a few times you here playing in the narrow streets. Thanks to Rocco (a local saints name I later learn) I was feeling recuperated and ready to take on the hills of the National Park dell'Alto Murgia. Given my starting point this turned out to be not so challenging  and with little effort I reached the Castel del Monte of Frederick 2nd.
 For those of us with a shaky understanding of the Holy Roman Emperers who attempted to follow in Charlemagne 's wake (see earlier posts) Fred 2 is pivotal. Son of Barbarossa who crops up on Sicilian trips he powered up the peninsula from his southern power base ('son of Puglia' as is claimed locally with pride) to unite something which we can recognize from school books as a version of the 'holy Roman empire ' combining lands now falling in Germany and Italy and seeing off the Mongols to boot! The man was a polymath and took a serious interest in classical antiquities hence the flourishes to his castles and wrote a guide to hawking which is considered now an early work of ecology !  He ended up 'King of Jerusalem' amongst many other titles having been excommunicated 4 times for not doing what various popes wanted but managed to broker a deal with the Saracen Turks which won the holy places bloodlessly . What a life!
Anyway having enjoyed my first sighting of the Adriatic / Ionian Sea I wound down towards the coast through olives and vines.

 The  land is dotted with field shelters called tutti locally very reminiscent of the Mani. Indeed there are loads of echoes (our olives are Koroneiki varieta l after the town of Coroni,  here they are  Coratino after the town of Corato! 

Arrivied that afternoon in lovely Rivo do Puglia.another medieval town this time with a jazz festival on. A pleasant evening including a chat with all three women in my life , Susannah and my daughter's Harriet and Kate who were all dining together in Bristol and I felt fleetingly homesick for the first time on the trip.