CROSSING THE LINE

We drive on to Italy's instep and Matera, home of the cave mazes called sassi.

Technically speaking, Matera lies in Basilicata, not Puglia. But you need a map to tell you've crossed the unseeable line.

The historic town is itself invisible, tucked along the edges of a rock abyss. It's not until you've followed a series of confusing signs to the city center and parked your car that you find the town plaza, more touches of baroque and the imposing duomo.

Keep moving. What you've come to see lies over the edges, in the maze of what has been called ``spontaneous architecture.''

Most cities start at the top: A hillside, a mountain, a promontory. Matera swells from the bottom, an ancient series of caves carved into a ravine and expanded by man into homes, more than 100 churches with sweetly painted walls, and now, even restaurants and hotels.

This is human cityscape at its oldest, dating to the Paleolithic era tens of thousands of years ago. But what is most staggering is not that people once lived this way, but that they lived so until almost 1960, when the government moved half the population of 30,000 into modern housing above. When Elvis was first gyrating his pelvis and rocking the blues, families lived here within simple whitewashed walls as generations before them, sharing a single space with farm animals, resting on straw mattresses, cooking beneath an arch with a hole cut out for smoke.

Unlike so much of the world, Puglia retains a sense of space and place, with mile after mile of seafront and hills undisturbed by modern clutter. A spin through the hills brings us over a rise and to the startling sight of an imposing tower reaching more than 1,700 feet above the plateau. Even when you're expecting it, that first view of Castel del Monte makes you want to pull the car over and simply stare.

It's downright otherworldly, reminiscent of Wyoming's Devils Tower -- except this was made by man. Frederick II, to be precise, Holy Roman Emperor, king of Romans, Germany, Italy and even Burgundy, in the 13th century, though it is said that he never actually stayed there.

The strange, stark tower is a mish-mash of styles, with Romanesque lions, Gothic vaults and Islamic-style floors. Tower sides rise 80 feet, and standing in the open, eight-sided vault feels a bit like traveling through time; you expect a mail-clad knight to tromp through any minute. Theories about the place abound: Was it a mathematical puzzle, an astrological observatory, or something even more mystical? Standing in the open atrium of the octagon, you can believe it was something more -- until a tour group arrives to spoil the magic.

LUSTY CUISINE

Oh, but I promised you food, didn't I?

For days now we've driven through grove after grove of olive trees, and it should be no surprise that more than half of all the olives grown in Italy are rooted in Puglia. So, too, are nearly half the country's earthy vegetables. Add the sea that edges this heel, and you should expect honest, lusty cuisine.

Which is just what you get: cheeses made fresh each morning, carrots and fennel and artichokes straight from the earth, fish still flopping in the market. All are cooked in oil pressed from the olives growing outside the window of your masseria -- a centuries-old fortressed farmhouse-turned-inn.

The land is dotted with them. Massiera Torre Coccaro has been recommended for its cooking classes, and dinner the evening I arrive gives testament that this is a culinary choice well made. The menu offers up wild boar ham with buffalo mozzarella, pistachio-breaded quennel of ricotta cheese with tomato and olive sauce, scampi millefeuiles with shaved fennel, homemade ravioli with a toasted walnut sauce, risotto with mussels and artichokes, baby lobster with bacon in a carrot and ginger sauce. Every ounce of bread and broth is homemade.

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