Day trips from Lecce

I like Otranto very much, I spent several weeks around there when I was a teen (so half a century ago!). The Otranto Chatedral is quite moving.

Be warned that trains south of Lecce are on the Ferrovie Sud Est network, sorely needing some serious signaling update, so now they are bound to keep low speeds - so both Gallipoli and Otranto are 1.30/2 hours from Lecce. Service severely reduced on Sunday. Gallipoli has some direct trains, while Otranto needs one or two changes in tiny stations. The station in Otranto is 20 minutes walking from the city center (downhill arriving, uphill departing). Monopoli is more distant but being on national railway network the trains are faster.

We have not been to Gallipoli, so I cannot address that one. We did go to Otranto with our Road Scholar group, but all we saw there was the Tree of Life floor mosaic in the church. It is wonderful. We learned a lot from our guide about the history of the town, including the devastating attack by the Ottomans in 1480. But we did not see much of the town itself; or if we did, it was not particularly memorable.

We did visit Monopoli on our own, on a daytrip from Lecce. We took the train up, walked abound and were charmed by the lovely oldtown area with its white buildings (many with blue doors, as I have seen in photos of some Greek Islands). We stopped for lunch at a restaurant with outside tables and enjoyed a fresh seafood salad (skipping the fresh-caught sea urchins we saw a fisherman drop off in a bucket 5 minutes earlier). And then we wandered along the seafront to a sandy beach I identified on google satellite view. And my husband went for a swim in the Adriatic. That was exactly a year ago today—-February 24, 2023. I just remembered that when I saw your post and thought of Monopoli.

So you can probably guess which would be my Number 1 recommendation. I will leave it to others to help you decide on the second.

I will be doing Southern Italy in November for the month so visiting those cities as well. Also going to Ostuni, Molfetta, Polignano and Trani. I travel by public transport as well. I think Sitasud is the bus company and ferrrovie del sud est the train such as it is. I don't make a move without checking out rome2rio.com and finding bus/train companies from their schedule for finessing. This trip will be the first where I am moving every 2-4 days versus staying a week to 10 days in one apt and heading out from there.

Thanks everyone.