In these times of viruses shall we think about summer destinations, just to keep our minds positive, knowing that summer is coming back and travel can resume. Soon I hope!

I thought that the introduction of sunny Locorotondo is perfect during these not so cheerful times.

Locorotondo—which is part of the “Most Beautiful Villages” list—is one of Puglia’s prettiest towns with a proudly conserved, easily-walkable center and a calm, laid-back atmosphere, and so perfectly clean and neat.

Locorotondo overlooks the Valle d’Itria, a buffer of greenery halfway between the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea and on this plain, surrounded by small hills. It rises neat and silent on the top of a hill that surrounds the last Murgian buttresses of the Bari area.

Harmoniously rounded as the name itself suggests, Locorotondo owes its name to the morphology assumed by the first inhabited center, built around the year one thousand.

The first huts of a village made up of farmers were built on an equipped plateau, leaning against each other, with a circular plan, as if they wanted to surround the land torn from oak and pine woods to make it cultivable and fertile.

From the two original gates, one enters a web of streets that wind indolently up to the central piazza. The white-washed walls of the houses are interrupted by the occasional polychrome flash of a baroque palace or a vibrantly colored flowers on the window sills. When touring the streets, I was quite sure that each house competed with neighbors who had the most beautiful windowsill.

The early 19th century Church of St. George and the fine Romanesque Church of the Madonna della Greca are worth a look but monuments and churches are not the reason to visit Locorotondo: its charm lies in the collective whole rather than in its constituent parts.

Locorotondo is definitely worth your “Travel List” or “Bucket List.”