Our kind host in Pietrapertosa messaged me with details of how to find our house and sent some photographs. It wasn't until I saw the pics that I realised that we might have underestimated the challenge of getting there! After I saw these pics we agreed that she would meet us in the carpark of the town and she would drive the last section!

One simple sentence will suffice. "It doesn't work"  Well not in the busy Italian towns where I needed it most.  You'd think that the genuises behind car navigation systems would take the trouble to find out which roads in a town are one-way. No, that would be far too much trouble. I discovered their lack of attention to detail as I tried to navigate my way through the extremely congested city of Martina Franca. I was offered a route that sent me down one way streets. You can't of course go down these streets and once you pass them, the navigation system has some sort of nervous breakdown and offers a route that takes you on a vast circle through industrial waste lands as you try to work out where on earth you are.  I am not joking when I say we ended up going in a circle three times.  I'm  not aware of studies that have been done on the stress levels of drivers who have been hijacked by car GPS systems but I'm guessing it's up there with realising one of the engines of your aircraft has suddenly stopped working.

We had intended to visit the beautiful town of Matera on our way to Pietrapertose but the GPS system had other ideas and we ended up going in totally the wrong direction and adding about an hour to the journey.

However, once I ditched the in car system and used google maps on my phone things improved. We wound our way up the corkscrew road leading to Pietrapertosa and our host came in her car to collect us.

All the stress of the journey melted away when we walked out of our room into our little private garden.

The town has one main paved artery running through the middle and everywhere else is a maze of steps in which we have got lost a few times. 

Getting out of Pietrapertosa was quite a mission. The cloud was very low so visibility on the road down the mountain was about 75 metres. On a winding road like that it was pretty hair raising but luckily, once we got out of the cloud it was ok.

The drive to Bari was uneventful other that the mistake I made when I misread the GPS and found myself up the ramp to the autostrada heading in the wrong direction. Because we were on a tight time schedule I knew that I had to abort the mission and  do a U turn on the ramp which placed me directly in the line of any car coming off the motorway. However, luckily I did it quickly enough and we were saved from a massive detour.  

Some photos from the village. We bought some provisions in the general store. I was fascinated by a bottle of 95% proof "Pure Alcohol". Who on earth drinks that stuff?

The penultimate pic is of the shopkeeper helping a customer decide between two coffee percolators.