Polignano a Mare

May 25, 2019

Volare, oh oh / Cantare, oh oh oh oh

Most of you are probably familiar with this infectious song lead in, and can place the tune immediately. Most of you may know it from Dean Martin’s we’ll-known rendition, but you might not have heard the original Italian version, by the composer Domenico Modugno. If you haven’t, you should stop and listen now.

I had never heard of Domenico Modugno before, but he was an important musical figure in modern Italy, and is recognized as the country’s first cantautore (singer-songwriter). Volare, composed in 1958, is his best known song by far. His version won the Grammy award for both best album and best song in 1959, the first year the Grammy was awarded. He was also a film actor, a comedian, and a politician, serving briefly in the Italian Senate as a member of the Radical party.

We probably won’t be listening to Volare again ourselves for awhile though, because we’ve had our fill for the moment. This is because we are staying tonight Polignano a Mare, Domenico Modugno’s birthplace. Our hotel host claims that Modugno wrote Volare with his birthplace in mind, with its astonishing cliffs plunging into the blue sea and myriad swifts endlessly gyrating beneath them.

There is a monumental statue to the great man just below our hotel window, and we could hear crowds gathered around the statue singing Volare as we tried to go to sleep. We probably heard the song forty or more different times in our short stay here. So, enough for awhile.

Domenico Modugno takes flight. With any luck at all, you can hear the crowd spontaneously sing along with him here, or you could initiate a rendition yourself to see who joins in.

First though, we had to get here. The ride from Ostuni to Polignano is probably the easiest stage of the entire tour - a short 33 miles. After dropping from Ostuni to the sea it’s a virtually flat run up the coast the rest of the day. With a tailwind. Very nice.

First, a preview:

We begin the day with a half mile detour to Ostuni’s bike store, for another attempt at having my gears adjusted. This shop looks promising from their website, advertising a service department. It doesn’t though indicate that the service department is closed on Saturdays, so we struck out again.

No worries though - there really is nothing to today’s ride, workwise. Who needs gears? After a five mile gentle glide to the sea through an ocean of olive orchards, we turn downwind and cruise along the quiet seaside for a few hours, stopping only in Torre Canne for lunch, enjoying a pesche spada burger and drink, sitting in a nice dory with a seaside view.

Ostuni presents its best face to the sea, with its impressive sheer whitewashed walls.

Image not found :( — Rachael contemplates the coming miles dropping through an ocean of olive groves.

Dropping through the olive groves, with the Adriatic ahead.

Old, gnarled olive trees are so wonderfully diverse.

The view from our lunch-dory, Torre Canne

I think the pale apron beneath these olives is pollen drop, but it’s just a guess really.

Polignano a Mare is a spectacular coastal town, it’s houses rising up from the sheer cliffs The town is built on. It makes a quite impressive sight, and it is fun to wander around the narrow streets of its old town, many of which end abruptly at the edge of the cliff. There is a concrete barrier of course, but it would be easy enough to lean too far over for a view and tumble straight down to the rocks and water.

I can’t say we enjoyed the place as much as we thought we might though. Even this early in the season the streets are quite crowded, and you can find yourself trapped or bottlenecked by tour groups slowly making their way through its maze. If we came back, we’d do it off-off season - sometime around my birthday, say.