Martina Franca is a smart town settled 431 metres above sea level, lying over one of the last southern hills in the south-east of the Murgia area. It overlooks the charming Valle d’Itria, a beautiful region with trees and white houses called “trulli”.

The main attraction of the town is definitely the old town centre, a typical example of baroque art, with its smart streets, its white lanes, its elegant mansions and its stately and monumental churches. The old town centre of Martina Franca is very suggestive and peculiar. It is artistically beautiful and original and it offers to the visitors a scenery made of lanes, little white houses and enchanting small streets.
It reaches its maximum charme in the Lama complex, where you can admire a wonderful baroque style on the palaces, the wrought iron balconies, the lovely and ancient churches and in the characteristic corners and little squares. Besides a fascinating landscape, marked by the ancient “casedde”, the famous "Trulli" and the typical local farms called “masserie”, Martina Franca is surrounded by a Karst territory, rich in suggestive caves.

From its strategic position, the Ionic town offers to its visitors a striking view over the towns nearby, over which there are the cities of Brindisi and Bari and their territories and, still over, the Adriatic sea. Martina Franca also offers to its visitors a chance to give a glance towards lovely woods, such as the enchanting “Parco delle Pianelle”, and towards green landscapes in the south. These are mainly wide vines fields, and they represent little oasis of peace and tranquillity for holidaymakers and expecially for those who love farm holidays. The town, in which nowadays live around 49.000 people, is also a very important site at national level for its clothes industry. Other important sectors, leading the economy of the town, are agribusiness and breeding, thanks to the presence over the territory of a precious livestock, ackoledged all over Italy and abroad, whose main specimens are the famous donkey of Martina Franca and the Murgese horse. So Martina Franca is a very popular touristic site, not only for its rich and precious architectural, historical and artistic heritage,but also for its cultural activities that reach their best expression in the famous and awaited “Valle d’Itria Festival”.
The Valle d'Itria Festival is an annual opera and classical music event held in the town of Martina Franca, right in the middle of the Apulian region, loved by critics and scholars and attended by many globtrotting music lovers. The programme in 2005 showcases three operas, which take place in the Palazzo Ducale, and five concerts, which are scattered throughout the city and its surroundings. For further details, please visit the festival website. For more information and to get the 2006 program Valle d'Itria Festival. Market day is held on Thuesday mornings in the hystorical center.