Italy has two faces. One is the face the whole world watches - Venice, Rome, Tuscany, photographs for Instagram. The other is Puglia. The heel of the Italian „boot", the region between the Adriatic and Ionian seas, where the men still talk on the square in the evening, and where the women on the doorsteps of the houses still hand-make the celebratory pasta. In Puglia you sleep in a masseria - a 16th-century farmstead. And that is precisely why right now Puglia is the destination Europe's elite quietly speaks of among themselves, without turning it into a seasonal news story.

Masseria means a walled farm. These were the old farms of the great landowners, with olive groves, vineyards, cows and roads that lead nowhere - and precisely for that reason everyone now wants to live in them. Today, many of them have been converted into hotels, or into private summer homes for people who do not want five stars but five centuries.

The route begins in Bari, the regional capital. Polignano a Mare, with houses perched on the cliffs above the turquoise sea, is one of those places that looks like a photomontage until you arrive - then you wonder how something real can be so unreal. Locorotondo, with its circular alleyways and white houses with flower-filled balconies, is the quiet heart of the trip.

Inland, in the sun, stands Castel del Monte - an octagonal medieval castle, a UNESCO world heritage site, surrounded by meadows of wildflowers and vineyards. Nobody knows precisely what it was built for - coronations, hunts, or the courtly geometry of a ruler in love with mathematics. The mystery itself is part of the appeal.

The heart of the region is the Itria Valley and its trulli - low, circular stone houses with conical roofs. In the Monti area near Alberobello there are around 1,000 such structures, most from the 16th century onwards. They look like something out of a fairy tale - and it is precisely because of that that no one believes they were once living farms, with people, livestock and everyday life.

To the south, Lecce shines with baroque architecture chiselled from local stone, while Otranto, at Italy's easternmost point, offers waters so turquoise that the Adriatic seems to put the Caribbean to shame. The local sea bream, the fruit and vegetables, the seafood and the creamy burrata turn the trip into something between a holiday and a long-postponed self-opening.

For the Balkans, Puglia has a special resonance. There is no Dubrovnik with its tidy queues, no Capri with its every-corner-known charm. This is Italy without a camera in hand - the Italy the Balkans understands naturally, because here too life is still measured in olive trees, garden tomatoes and an afternoon nap. Only there they sell it for money. Here we still want to give it away for free.