Take a regional train and be somewhere new in around 30 minutes. Trani and its famous honey-coloured cathedral, right on the sea, or Bari, a city living a renaissance with its raucous old town. Both are an easy ride from Molfetta station.
Take a car or train south for the postcard Puglia: Polignano a Mare on its cliff, Monopoli's little harbour, the trulli of Alberobello, the white lanes of Ostuni. An hour or so each way - go early, soak it up, drive back at dusk.
Give it a full day and you can reach more or less anywhere in Puglia: the baroque city of Lecce, the caves at Castellana, the beaches of Salento, the or the wild Gargano headland to the north.
A perfect octagon on a wild hilltop: eight sides, eight towers, eight rooms per floor, built for Emperor Frederick II around 1240 - with no moat, no kitchen, no stables and no agreed purpose. Nobody knows, which is exactly why it's so incredible. A UNESCO site, and so iconic it's on the Italian 1-cent coin.
One of the great cities of Italian antiquity, hiding under a modern town. Beneath Canosa lie the Ipogei - monumental underground tombs cut for Daunian nobles 2,300 years ago. The treasures found here fill the world's museums - the anthropomorphic vases are on permanent show at the British Museum - but the tombs themselves are still here, and you can go down into them with local archaeologists, almost alone.
Famous for Pane di Altamura DOP, arguably Italy's finest bread - thick-crusted, golden, baked in wood-fired ovens from local durum wheat. But there's more: a cathedral commissioned by the same Frederick II who built Castel del Monte, and, in a cave just outside town, the Man of Altamura - a Neanderthal fused into the rock for around 150,000 years.
