Things to do in Bari

Landmark · Bari Vecchia

The eleventh-century Romanesque church built to hold the relics of Saint Nicholas, brought here from Myra by Barese sailors in 1087.

Local tip: The crypt holds a Catholic altar and an Orthodox one, and Orthodox liturgy is celebrated there — it is one of very few churches in Italy where that is routine. Go on a Thursday evening for the Orthodox service and the atmosphere is completely different from a Catholic mass.

Food · Bari Vecchia

A single narrow lane where women make orecchiette by hand on tables outside their front doors and sell them from the same tables.

Local tip: It is a genuine domestic industry rather than a performance, and it is also now heavily visited — buy from a doorway further along rather than the first one, and buy the dried version if you are taking it home. Go before eleven.

Neighborhood · Along the eastern seafront

The Fascist-era monumental promenade, wide and straight for kilometres, with the palazzi of the Murat expansion facing the Adriatic.

Local tip: This is where Bari walks, runs and takes the passeggiata, and it stays busy well after dark in summer. The section past the Teatro Margherita towards the Fiera is the calmer end; the stretch by the Molo San Nicola is where people actually gather.

Culture · Murat quarter

Italy's fourth-largest opera house, privately built in 1903, burned down in 1991 and reopened after nineteen years of legal and reconstruction battles.

Local tip: The reopening in 2009 was a genuine civic event, and the story of the fire and the rebuilding is worth reading before you go. Tickets are cheap by Italian opera standards and the upper tiers are often available on the day.

Nature · 35km south-east

A town on a limestone cliff over a shingle cove, with sea caves under the houses and the coastal road running south towards Monopoli.

Local tip: The Ferrovie del Sud Est line gets you there without the parking fight, which in summer is the whole game. Go out of season if you can — in August the cove is genuinely full — and eat at Monopoli, ten minutes further on, where the harbour is working rather than photogenic.

Culture · Carrassi, south of the centre

A Russian Orthodox church built before the First World War for pilgrims coming to San Nicola, in a quiet residential quarter well away from the tourist route.

Local tip: It was transferred back to the Russian Orthodox Church a little over a decade ago and is an active parish, not a monument. It explains something about Bari that nothing in the old town does — this has been a pilgrimage destination for the Orthodox world for nine hundred years.