Bari

by Renee · Published May 6, 2025 · Updated May 7, 2025

Bari is a port city on the Adriatic Sea, and the capital of southern Italy’s Puglia region. Its mazelike old town, Barivecchia, occupies a headland between 2 harbors. Surrounded by narrow streets, the 11th-century Basilica di San Nicola, a key pilgrimage site, holds some of St. Nicholas’ remains. To the south, the Murat quarter has stately 19th-century architecture, a promenade and pedestrianized shopping areas. (Per Google).

We saved our tour of Bari for our last day in the PUGLIA region of Italy. We did have big plans to eat a lot but we did try most of the Apulian traditional food over the last week so we behaved lol.

We arrived with our rental car and dropped it at the train station and walked to our apartment. We again stayed in the old town maze and we had to walk through the piazza of many shops until we entered one of the gates of the old town. Our host allowed us to check in at 10:30 AM.

San Giuseppe church was on the corner of our walk followed by San Rita bakery. Just a side note.

We quickly dropped our bags and headed out to explore. Our first stop was the Strada Arco Basso where the Italian women make the orecchiette pasta. Although it was crowded, it was fun to watch. Since we have small luggage we did not buy any to take home. We did have our share of it already on many days.

We were getting quite hangry but the restaurant that was recommended to us by our initial taxi cab driver last week was not open. We were trying to kill time so we walked to the cathedral of San Nicola. It was quite amazing. The downstairs crypt of the San Nicola had a very unique liturgical service going on. I have never seen anything like it. It was some sort of pilgrimage with women with covered heads, eating something out of a chalice, which appeared to be on a spoon.

San Nicola was born in Turkey. Some of his bones are buried in the crypt in Bari. Yes, this is Santa Claus. Read the history. It’s pretty interesting:

https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Nicola_di_Bari

The Basilica is both Catholic and Orthodox Christian and the basilica in the crypt is Orthodox so the liturgical service we saw was an Orthodox liturgical service of some kind.

These sites explain the history of the Basilica very well.

Basilica di San Nicola | AroundBari

https://orthochristian.com/121304.html

The restaurant that we wanted never opened so we tried a different one to get the fried spaghetti that was recommended by the taxi driver. It is called spaghetti ‘all assassini. I loved it! We shared the pasta and I needed some chicken and that was also delicious. We continued to wonder around and had a caffe Leccese until we headed back to our room to get ready to go back out.

I misread the San Nicola festival sign and we missed tonight’s event that was 4-630pm. It may have been a religious event bc it was at the basilica. I think it starts full blast the next three days. We walked along the harbor and watched the fisherman clean their boats. One was name S Rita. We walked up to the Ferris wheel and many food tents were ready to go but it was raining a little and it was not crowded. They were gearing up for the San Nicola festival. We ended up walking around the different squares and we were very surprised how calm it was. We stopped at a fish restaurant and had a light dinner.

Bari is definitely worth seeing.

We are off to Rome tomorrow on the train fingers crossed we don’t lose power!