Bari - The City

As I said a few posts ago, Bari is the 2nd largest city in southern Italy (after Naples) with about 1,000,000 people in its metropolitan area, and one of the great seaports on the Adriatic. We changed our itinerary to sleep in Bari for 3 nights over the Easter Weekend to take advantage of its nice supply of hotels and good transportation network. For a second time in a row we booked a room in advance and were not disappointed by the Hotel Moderno near Central Station.

And although we had low/no expectations for Bari, we found that we liked it a lot: university town, port city with a seemingly endless waterfront promenade, ancient to medieval old city, and trains and buses in every direction (not to mention ferries).

The scenery from the train on our way to Bari from Martina Franca was typical Apulia; vineyards, olive groves and wheat fields.




A walkway through a garden in front of the University of Bari, the most prestigious university in southern Italy and with 60,000 students.


The harbor.




Seaside soccer.


Street in the Old Town - not on a grid we made several serious navigation errors. ;-)


The Basilica of Saint Nicholas was impressive, in, out, and below.






The crypt below the transept; said to have relics of St. Nicholas.




Our hotel was in a multi-cultural neighborhood tucked in between the Train Stations and Bari University. Our neighborhood mosque.


And across the street was an Art Nouveau building.


Often we would run across a shrine decorated for Easter.


There are a series of "modern" buildings along the south waterfront promenade; a couple of Art Nouveau-ish theaters, and a string of between-the-wars monumental government buildings commissioned by Mussolini.