The trulli are still plentiful by the time you reach MARTINA FRANCA , a surprising town with a tangible Moorish flavour and a lively passeggiata at weekends. It is reputed to have been founded by Tarentine settlers fed up with constant Saracen attacks during the tenth century, but it was the Angevin prince of Táranto who bolstered the community in the early fourteenth century by granting it certain tax privileges. The town derives its name from this - franca meaning duty or stamp. Today its centre shelters within an unprepossessing approach of tower blocks, a medieval core adorned with some of the most subtle and least overbearing examples of architecture from the Baroque period you'll find.

Through the Porta di Santo Stefano , which marks the entrance to the old town, Piazza Roma is dominated by the vast Palazzo Ducale , dating from 1688 and now housing the town hall, but with a handful of rooms open to the public most mornings - most of them smothered in classically eighteenth-century Arcadian murals by a local artist. Just across the square, narrow Via Vittorio Emanuele leads right into the old town and Piazza Plebiscito, fronted by the vast Baroque facade of the Chiesa di San Martino , an eighteenth-century church built on the site of an earlier Romanesque structure, of which only the campanile survives. From adjacent Piazza Immacolata you can either bear left down Via Cavour, with its Baroque palazzi and balconied streets, or wander further into the old town, the roads running around the edge of the surviving fourteenth-century town walls offering an excellent panorama of the Valle d'Itria, with its neatly ordered fields dotted with trulli . Indeed, if you're further interested in finding out about life in the trulli , there's a Museo della Civiltà dei Trulli (closed for restoration; tel 0831.381.409), 7km from Martina Franca on the road to Ceglie Messápico.

The best time to visit Martina Franca (so long as you secure your accommodation well in advance) is during the Festival della Valle d'Itria (tel 080.480.5100) held from the end of July until the first week in August, one of the most important events on the Italian musical calendar, with opera, classical, jazz music and the like. Although tickets aren't cheap, it's a congenial and unpretentious event; information is available from the festival office in the Palazzo Ducale.