The two most south-eastern regions of Italy offer more than just undiscovered beaches and spectacular landscapes. Puglia, or Apulia, occupies the heel of the Italian boot. Its capital, Bari, boasts a dazzling cathedral and the important medieval basilica of San Nicola, where the saint who was the model for Father Christmas rests in a Romanesque crypt. But the whole of Puglia deserves exploration, from the natural beauties of the Gargano peninsula, with its tree-blanketed mountains overlooking the Adriatic Sea and the Celestial Basilica of Sant'Angelo, a pilgrimage site since the seventh century for the cult of the Archangel Michael, to the castles of the greatest of the Holy Roman Emperors, Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Castel del Monte near Andria, is one of the most perfect buildings of the Middle Ages. Further south in Puglia is the Salento region, whose two principal towns are Lecce, Italy's most astonishing Baroque city, and Otranto on the coast, which suffered Turkish occupation in 1480 and whose cathedral pavement is one of southern Italy's most interesting medieval works of art. The Ionian coast was the site of the first colonies of the ancient Greeks on the Italian mainland. They called it 'Enotria', the land of wine, a title it still holds proudly today, with such important wines as the rich dark Primitivo di Manduria and the complex Salice Salentino. The main town here is Taranto and it has a wonderful archaeological museum.

Inside the curve of the Italian boot's arch is perhaps the least well known of all the regions in Italy, Basilicata. 'The land of the two seas' straddles both the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas. Its chief city, Matera has evidence of human habitation as far back as Neolithic times, and it retains something of the prehistoric in its construction: it is carved out of one side of a deep ravine, in a form likened to that of an eagle, with two wings or Sassi, the Sasso Barisano toward the east and Sasso Caveoso to the west, with the Civita or old municipal centre forming the body of the eagle. Declared Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO in 1993, it is a world of its own: homes, churches and theatres all hollowed out of the cream-coloured stone. It has been the set for many films, most famously 'The Passion of the Christ'. But Basilicata is waiting to be discovered: from the beaches at Maratea on the Tyrrhenian Sea and the ancient Greek city of Metapontum on the Ionian coast to the small unspoiled hilltowns that have made this region the "Umbria of the South". Among the most beautiful are Vaglio di Basilicata, an important centre for the Templars on their way east to reconquer the Holy Land, and Tricarico, a city built by the Normans. Guardia Perticara is a perfect medieval town, and the Baroque glories of the tiny city of San Mauro Forte, with its 24 baronial palaces, should not be missed. The geography of Basilicata is amazingly varied, from the rich olive-bearing hills of the centre and the fruit gardens of the Val d'Agri toward the southern coast, to the Lucanian Dolomites, a series of crags with two towns clinging to them, Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa. In the virgin forests of Basilicata hide archaeological sites that predate even the Greeks, while the food and wine of the region are second to none: we might mention the world-famous Aglianico, mainly produced in northern Basilicata around the towns of Melfi and Venosa, with their castles... in short, Basilicata is waiting to be discovered.