Italian Cooking Holidays in Puglia

Flavours Cookery School in Puglia is the beautiful Casino Pisanelli. The venue was built in the 18th century and is surrounded by acres of olive groves. It has recently been featured in Homes & Gardens magazine, in an article entitled Italian Renaissance. Our week long courses in Pulgia are £1,599 per person with no single supplement, which is an added bonus for the single traveller. Our courses are held during the months of May, September and October, you'll find details of availablity in our dates and prices section.

With a long and beautiful coastline you are never far from the sea in Puglia so it’s not surprising that fish is a local staple and a focus of our Cooking Holidays in Puglia. Other ingredients close to the local chef’s heart include mouth watering ricotta cheese, chickpeas, capers, green peppers, aubergines, mozzarella and basil. There are fantastic market gardens in this region so the vegetables are locally grown, very fresh and often organic. Our itinerary includes a visit to the Otranto market, so that you can experience one of these wonderful markets for yourself!

This is a fertile part of Italy and the recipes that you will find on cooking holidays in Puglia reflect this, using abundant local produce and gallons of extra virgin olive oil, cold pressed closeby. There are also fantastic vineyards which produce primitivo and salice salentino wines as well as delicious limoncello liqueur. In our opinion, no Italian cookery course should miss out on the chance to sample as many of these local vintages as possible!

‘Pah! No cookery holiday elsewhere!’ says Sandro, Flavours own gardener in Puglia.

Cooking Holidays in Puglia

The light is bright and clear and the area is awash with seaside colours, which permeate into the way the food of the region is presented with vibrant colours and often a rustic feel to it. The flavours are fantastic.

Undiscovered and off the beaten track, Puglia forms the "heel" of Italy, bordered by the Adriatic Sea to the east and the Ionian Sea to the south. An ideal location for a gourmet holiday, it has the longest coast of any Italian region, eight hundred kilometres of coastline stretching down the Adriatic and around the heel into the high arch of the lonian Sea and the Gulf of Taranto. This heel reaches out towards the Eastern Mediterranean, and at times the landscape has the look and feel of Greece rather than the gentler Italy of Rome and the North.