Bari

Bari doesn't perform for you. It's a working port at the heel of Italy, facing east across the Adriatic toward Greece and the Balkans, and it has been trading across that water for the better part of three thousand years. Its heart is Bari Vecchia, a sun-bleached maze of lanes where women still roll orecchiette on wooden boards in the street, and at its edge stands the Basilica di San Nicola, where the bones of the saint who became Santa Claus have drawn pilgrims, Catholic and Orthodox alike, since the eleventh century.