Colours and flavours of Trani

Imagine you’re in 1962, in Milan suburbs. A tavern with faint light and a jukebox playing old-fashioned 33s LPs. Twist did still not arrive there. You’re in a bar where life goes on and life stories are narrated, sad stories, never happened stories. A bar where writers and painters, nowadays they would be defined as emerging, tell their stories and express their ideas, weird ideas sometimes. Stories bathed in wine.

These inns were called Trani. Like the Apulian city, 800 km south from Milan, where those wines came from. Good quality and high-proof blended wines, brought to Milan from Southern immigrants. Giorgio Gaber vividly described the atmosphere of this taverns in his son “Trani a gogò”. 

More than fifty years later, in the countryside north of Bari, farmers continue to grow grapes, just like they did in the sixties. Walking around countryside you can still admire the colours of nature, the yellow and violet of ripe grapes, the red of indian figs during the summer, wonderful reds and yellows of vines in autumn, shiny booming fields during the spring. Where people work with patience, passion and dedication. In this countryside “Moscato D.O.C. di Trani” is produced and bottled, golden yellow with intense scent, sweet and velvety taste, excellent with almond based desserts, typical of the region.

Once in Trani, impossible not to stop visiting the cathedral, one of the few religious buildings, a majestic Romanic cathedral, just next to the Adriatic sea. Shiny and white, built with local stones, the well-known “pietra di Trani”, that you could easily recognize in many monuments in Bari area. Apart from his unique position (sunsets on the peer a few meters away from the cathedral are unforgettable), you will be impressed by its grandeur, the tower bell is 59 meters high (193ft). The port area, vivacious during the morning due to fisher boats and leisure port, during the evening becomes a perfect scenario for an intense nightlife, with a lot of bars and restaurants for everybody’s taste.