I’ve just come back from a week in Puglia, and I didn’t rent a car. That may surprise you, as the number one way to see southern Italy is from behind the wheel —and for good reason. Aside from the lax driving rules and how easy it is to pick up a vehicle at the airport, lots of the major visitor attractions are only accessible by car, like the best beaches in the area. 

Despite knowing all that, I still decided to rely on trains and buses throughout my trip in June 2025. In fact, this is my second time travelling around the boot of Italy this way. You may be thinking, “I don’t speak Italian, I’m not adventurous enough to hop on and off public transportation across the country. Surely it’s not worth the hassle!?”

Well, neither do I! And you don’t have to be as adventurous as you think; the south of Italy is surprisingly well-connected by trains and buses — we saw plenty of people using both as we navigated around, tourists and locals alike.

Why take public transport in Southern Italy? 

If you have the time and don’t want the hassle of renting a car, buying petrol and figuring out your insurance, I’d recommend ditching the car.  

To give you a little background – I learned to drive as a teenager (as most do in Australia) around the suburbs of Sydney, have always enjoyed it, and still have a driver's licence. So far, so normal. That was, until I moved to London when I was 24. It’s been 6 years since then, and that means 6 years since I’ve been behind the wheel of a car. 

When faced with the prospect of navigating tiny cobbled streets, Vespas and overeager European drivers, it struck me that I’d maybe been off the roads for too long. So with that in mind, I decided to throw myself at the whim of bus and train schedules, while baking under the summer Puglian sun. 

Before we go any further, a caveat: yes, trains and buses do get delayed, and the service can be infrequent (especially on weekends and the off season). This kind of travel will only work for you if you’re happy to spend hours waiting around, and you allow yourself plenty of time to get where you want to go. For some people, it’s always going to be easier to just hire a car and have the freedom to move around, which I totally respect! 

Catching public transport between Brindisi, Maglie, Ostuni, Lecce and Monopoli

We flew in and out of Brindisi airport, then (thanks to a very beautiful, but very remote wedding) had to make our way down to a little town called Maglie — it's located almost smack-bang in the middle of the boot, about 80 km from the airport. To get there, we took the airport bus into the centre of Brindisi, stayed overnight, and then spent the next day slowly winding our way down the country. 

First, we caught a train from Brindisi to Lecce, ‘the Florence of the South’, and then hopped on a bus to Maglie from there. All in all, it took a couple of hours and two hops, whereas if we were to drive, we would have been there in just under an hour. Not the fastest way to go, but it was cheap (less than €10 per person) and reliable (especially when compared to other European rail networks). The train and bus both came when they were scheduled. 

We had to do it all again in reverse a couple of days later, which also went off without a hitch. 

On separate day trips, we also travelled from Brindisi by train/bus to other spots on our list like Ostuni (the ‘White City’, full of boutique shops and has views of rolling hills for days), Lecce (the ‘Florence of the South’, with looming sandstone churches and baroque buildings) and Monopoli (easiest access to sandy beaches by foot, also a very pretty town in its own right). 

How to plan your own trip around Southern Italy on public transport

So, you’re intrigued — how do you follow in my footsteps? 

Well, Google Maps is a good start — it’ll give you an idea of whether or not there is even a bus or a train available, and (because you can adjust the day/time you want to travel) it’ll give you a good idea of frequency. That being said, I found that it was more of a guideline than an accurate timetable. For example, we noticed that when we got to a train station, a few extra trains miraculously appeared on the departure board that didn’t seem to exist online. 

What next? You’ll need to look at blogs and official train and bus websites to get the lay of the land. The most important things to find out are: 

• Where do you want to go? 
• Can you get a train or bus there (while double-checking it actually exists)? 
• If it does, who sells you the tickets? 
• Where do you catch it from? 

In general, you’ll be able to find timetable information for almost all trains in Puglia on Trenitalia’s website, but keep in mind that some trains are run by the local provider FSE (including shuttle bus services between stations, as we found out when trying to go from Lecce to Maglie). We found that Omio sold tickets for these intercity buses, and I believe they also sell train tickets, too. 

Before you go and buy your train tickets online, we found it easier to just buy them beforehand at the station vending machines. They’re almost never sold out (especially for high-frequency routes), and it skips the hassle of having to buy it online. You can switch the language on the machine to English, the interface is easy to use, and you can easily see which trains are available/how much tickets cost. 

Buses are trickier — some shorter lines (like the ones from Brindisi airport or Ostuni train station to their respective city centres) are run by the individual city’s local authority, which means there’s a different way to pay on each. 

Our research pointed us to STP Brindisi for the airport bus tickets, and we used the MooneyGo app for the Ostuni bus. When we discovered that unofficial taxi drivers were charging €25 for trips into Ostuni’s town centre, which was less than a 10-minute drive away, we were glad we’d invested a little time into trawling the travel blogs for intel! 

The only catch there is that you need to find the bus stop, and they are often poorly marked. In many cities, both intercity and local buses use the same stops, so you may be looking for a very small shelter on the side of an unassuming street. Or if you see BUS written on the road, or a small FSE/local authority bus stop sign, that’s likely where you want to be.

We had a couple of examples of this — the bus stop from Lecce to Maglie was about a block away from the train station, tucked around the corner in a residential street. On the return journey, there was only a humble bus shelter on the side of the very busy highway to indicate where the bus would pick us up. Surprisingly, Google Maps was fairly accurate with pinpointing where these stops should be. But if in doubt, go to the nearest train station and ask. 

Pros & Cons of travelling by bus and train in Southern Italy

Pros: 

• It was extremely cheap! I think the most we paid was around €15 for an intercity express train, but tickets were more like €2–€6 per person. 
• No need to rent a car and navigate tiny, winding streets
• Trains are air-conditioned, good quality and generally reliable

Cons:

• You are limited in where you can reach by public transport (generally only larger towns and cities). For example, I would have loved to visit the sandy beaches around Otranto, but it just wasn’t worth us trying to squeeze it in by bus (even though it’s only a 30-min drive from Maglie)  
• You need to do your research to know where to base yourself for the best connections to the places you want to visit (Monopoli, Bari, Lecce and Brindisi are all fairly good options) 
• Sometimes, transport is delayed — it only happened to us once (a 20-minute delay, but we’d seen another train delayed by 3 hours) 
• Alternatives (taxi and Uber) can be expensive if you get stranded

So, would I recommend taking Puglia by public transport? Yes, if you’re happy to stick to the major cities, or don’t mind taking the extra time to get where you need to go. It’s not as hard to navigate as you might think, but you do need to do a bit of legwork to figure out tickets and timetables. Just remember to look beyond Google Maps!