Alta Murgia
Puglia's karst steppe under a big sky — dry-stone shepherd country around Frederick II's octagonal castle, with Neanderthal bones in one cave and dinosaur tracks in a quarry.
The Alta Murgia is a limestone plateau tilted between Bari and the Bradano trench, and it breaks every Italian-landscape expectation: no rivers, no forests to speak of, no hilltowns crowding the skyline — just swelling grassland, dry-stone walls running to the horizon, and sky. Rain vanishes straight into the karst, so the plateau was never ploughed into the intensive patchwork of the lowlands; what grew instead, over centuries of transhumant sheep flocks walking the tratturi up from the coast, is one of the largest steppe grasslands left in Italy. The national park, designated in 2004, protects that pastoral survival: the jazzi (walled sheepfolds built into slopes), the masserie fortified against raiders, and the grassland itself, which flushes with orchids in April.
The plateau's one vertical gesture is Castel del Monte, the octagonal castle Frederick II raised on a summit at its northern edge in the 1240s — mathematically strange, garrison-free, a UNESCO site whose purpose is still argued about. The horizontal surprises are underground. In the Lamalunga cave near Altamura, potholers in 1993 found a complete Neanderthal skeleton fused into the calcite, perhaps 150,000 years old; "Altamura Man" is still down there, studied in place. In an abandoned quarry outside the same town, a Cretaceous tidal flat carries thousands of dinosaur footprints. And the Pulo di Altamura, a doline half a kilometre across, opens in the middle of the steppe like a dropped bowl.
The wildlife is steppe wildlife, rare in western Europe: calandra larks and stone-curlews in the grass, and above the old towns of Altamura and Gravina in Puglia the lesser kestrel — the two cities host colonies among Europe's largest, and on summer evenings the birds hawk insects over the rooftops in flickering hundreds. Wolves quietly reoccupied the plateau in the 2010s, denning in the abandoned quarries.
What's worth knowing before you go
Altamura and Gravina in Puglia are the gateways, both on the Ferrovie Appulo Lucane line from Bari; Castel del Monte is reached from Andria, with a seasonal shuttle. Distances deceive on the plateau — carry water always, and skip July and August entirely, when the steppe is an anvil. Late April to May is the season: orchids out, kestrels back, wheat still green.
The connoisseur's move is to finish a walk in Altamura at a wood-fired oven around six, when the DOP loaves come out — pane di Altamura is the steppe's durum wheat in edible form, and a heel of it with local olive oil explains the landscape better than any placard.