Otranto old town and the Aragonese castle

Otranto is small — you can walk the walled town end to end in ten minutes — and almost every surface inside is whitewashed, which turns the narrow lanes into soft light boxes for most of the day. The main street runs uphill from the harbour gate to the cathedral, and the side lanes off it are quiet even in July if you go before nine.

The Aragonese castle anchors the south side. Its bastions and dry moat are open to walk, and the low stone walls along the seaward side give you a clean line of masonry with nothing but water behind — the best of the wide frames here, and it works at any hour because the stone is pale.

The cathedral is worth going inside for one reason: the entire floor is a twelfth-century mosaic of a tree of life, signed by a monk named Pantaleone, and it is one of the few church interiors in the south where the floor is the picture. Photography rules and service times vary, so check on the door.

On the harbour side the light is best in the last hour, when the sun drops behind the town and the boats and the sea wall go warm; at dawn the same view is cool and blue, with the light coming straight off the Adriatic.