Italy — Well-heeled

POLIGNANO A MARE, Italy — Puglia has some of the brightest seas, most diverse art and architecture, most mouthwatering peasant cuisine and kindest people in all of Italy — including strangers who will go out of their way to lead you to one after another stunning beach on impossibly lapis-lazuli waters.

Puglia is the heel to Italy's boot, and after two weeks spent touring the region, I felt grateful that charter airlines don't disgorge hordes of tourists here. These are just some of the reasons:

BRILLIANT SEAS — "I said put it back, this is a natural park," a stern father told his son. He was pointing to the octopus that sat with protruding eyes on the boy's shoulders after being plucked from the crystalline waters at Natural Maritime Reserve of Torre Guaceto, just north of Brindisi.

With more than 500 miles of coast on two seas, the Adriatic and the Ionian, Puglia has all sorts of gorgeous beaches. For white limestone cliffs spotted with the deep green of gnarled pine trees, try the southernmost tip of Salento.

At opposite ends of this peninsula, I swam in the fingerlike cove of Porto Badisco, where legend has it that Italy's mythological founder, Aeneas, landed, and I dove even deeper into history at Portoselvaggio, where remains of Neanderthal men were found.

A few miles north, it's all about sandy expanses, like Punta della Suina, where the setting sun turns the transparent water pink.

But it's Torre Guaceto that gets my gold medal — for the baby-powder white sand, the schools of silvery fish flitting from reef-like rock formations in pools of turquoise water, and the scent of pine needles drifting from the pristine forest that borders the beach.

LIVING HISTORY — No other image says Puglia better than the trullo, a rural home that's essentially a whitewashed tepee of small limestone slabs stacked without mortar, with a cone surmounted by pagan or religious symbols. They are scattered among olive groves and huge prickly pear cacti in the Valle d'Itria, inland in a triangle between Bari, Taranto and Brindisi.

Of unknown origin and unique to Puglia, they date at least from the Middle Ages. Most are still inhabited and more than 1,400 huddle in Alberobello. The town might feel a bit too touristy for Puglia, with its souvenir shops exhibiting plastic trulli, but it only takes a look at the clotheslines in a trullo back yard to realize that real life goes on in this primitive fairy-tale place.

Farther inland is the Murge, scorched highlands grooved by canyons where, in the Middle Ages, people built cave dwellings as homes and churches when they fled from pirates.