While driving to various towns, the view has been a combination of fields of olive trees, farms with horses, donkeys or cows, fields of fruit trees, or farms that have already harvested their goods since its rows and rows of dirt.

As we get closer to the water, we see grapevines. Sometimes the rows and rows of grapevines are covered with netting or plastic sheets, and thanks to google we now know that those are grapes that will be harvested in the late fall, and it’s best for the grapes to not take on too much rain water within six weeks of harvesting.

(We think these are table grapes)

(Plums that aren’t yet ripe)

More grapevines:

Limestone walls line the sides of the roads and are also used as property lines. I bet an arial view of Puglia would look like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s very pretty to drive through.

There are a lot of fig trees in the area, some just growing wild out of the sides of rocks, but majority without the fig fruit. Google says it’s because they don’t get enough water.

A side note about cypress trees: I love them. Every trip to Italy I think about how nice it would be to have cypress trees line our driveway at home. On this trip, we noticed the cemetery in Minori, perched high on the cliff, had beautiful cypress trees surrounding it. Paul tells me the cemetery in Pico was similar. And we’ve now seen several cemeteries in Puglia, and can pick them out on our drives through the region by the tell tale grouping of cypress trees.

Thanks to google, I now know that cypress trees are known as mourning trees and were planted as far back as the ancient Greeks to signify the location where someone has died.

(Pretty sure we have pics of the cemetery in Minori on the good camera so I’ll update this post in a few days with pics.)

Finally, a special thanks to Bob and Anne (hi guys!) for letting us borrow their GPS. It’s been invaluable as we’ve navigated this landscape every day, exploring the region. It’s navigated us up and over the mountains, often a different route even if we are going to the same destination, but it’s always brought us to where we need to go. The only time it struggled, and so did the rental car GPS, was when we went to Vesuvius since the volcano’s crater doesn’t have an exact address. We’ve named the GPS, Stefano.