It's really hard to cook down a trip like this into a set of bullet points, but I thought I'd summarize our experience in case others are contemplating a bike tour in Puglia.

Weather

We were lucky and hit the weather window almost perfectly.  Other than one day of very strong (head)wind, we had no issues with the weather.  No rain at all.   When the sun came out, it was intense and we heated up quickly.  So I think May is a pretty good time to do this tour.   There's probably a good window in the fall, too.  October, maybe?

Food

We didn't have a bad meal during the entire trip.  We used Google Maps to search for well-rated restaurants when we could, but sometimes we just walked into whatever place was in front of us.  The menus are very heavily biased toward seafood, especially shellfish.  Salads and vegetables were available, but not prominent.  Nonetheless, we liked everything we ate!

And the gelato was consistently excellent, too! :)

Language

We were surprised that some people even in restaurants or hotels didn't speak much English.  In the bigger tourist spots (Matera, Lecce), English was spoken.  But in the smaller or less touristed spots, Rich had a chance to use his Duolingo Italian.  He inevitably got good reactions for trying, even though he's far from fluent.  People seemed to warm up immediately.  So be prepared with some form of translation technology (phrasebook, Google Translate) if you don't have some basic Italian skills.

Just a note:  All of the Italian people we encountered were helpful, kind, and patient with us.  We didn't have a single negative interaction during the entire trip.

Roads

Yes, we've complained at length about the roads.  Just to provide context, we're not snobs about roads.  We happily ride gravel and dirt roads, and the paving around where we live is not the best.

Some of the paving we encountered was seriously dangerous.  Especially on the west coast of Puglia, the roads required constant attention.  We regularly had to slalom around potholes that were fully capable of swallowing the front wheel.  

The route from Santa Maria di Leuca to Otranto had the best roads of the trip.  The route from Taranto to Porto Cesario had the worst.

Sights

There's a lot to see in Puglia and we saw beautiful country scenery and amazing old buildings and cities.  Again, the west coast of Puglia was less consistently beautiful than the rest of the region.  We probably wouldn't ride the route between Taranto and Santa Maria di Leuca again.  It just wasn't interesting enough to justify the work involved in cycling it.

Matera is a don't miss sight.  Nardó, Lecce, Otranto, Ostuni, Alberobello, and Monopoli were all very much worth visiting in our opinion.

Trash

I would be remiss if I did not mention the amount of trash that is strewn across the back roads of Puglia.  It's a blight on the landscape, and a sad comment on a real lack of infrastructure to support the local people.

Because cyclists travel on back roads and at a slower speed, the trash issue is more difficult for us to ignore.  After 2 weeks, we kind of stopped seeing it.  But it's not pretty and some may not be able to ignore it.  Consider yourself warned!

Hotels

We generally do two bike trips a year of about two weeks each.  This allows us to spend more on accommodation than if we were out for the multiple week or month journeys that are often documented on CycleBlaze.  

With that caveat, all of the hotels, B&Bs, and rented rooms we stayed in were good quality.  All of them provided some kind of secure storage for the tandem (we check for this in advance).  If we had to quibble, it would be that the beds in almost all of the hotels were really hard.  It's tough on our old bodies!

Hotel breakfasts ranged from copious to minimal.  Several places gave us a card to redeem at a local coffee shop for a coffee and a cornetto (croissant).  We carry breakfast bars to supplement minimal breakfasts like that.

We use Booking.com for all of our reservations.

Overall

Would we do this tour again?  Absolutely, but we'd probably try to avoid riding the west coast north of Gallipoli.  

Overall, we really liked Puglia.  It's a really pretty, quiet, and relatively unspoiled place.   We loved the old walled cities with the twisty streets and stairways.  We loved riding down the quiet country roads with olive groves everywhere around us.  The coastal ride north from Sainta Maria di Leuca was stunning.   And we enjoyed the food and the incredibly warm Italian people we met. 

That's all I can think of!  Hopefully these notes will help others thinking about a possible bike tour in Puglia.

Thanks again for reading.