There is a version of the Italian summer everyone books, and a better one almost no one does. The first is the Amalfi Coast in August -- extraordinary, and now so crowded that the drive from Sorrento to Positano can take longer than the flight from London.
The second is Puglia. Same warm sea, the same long dinners, but at half the density and a fraction of the friction. You trade the vertical drama of the cliffs for something lower and older: whitewashed towns, olive groves to the horizon, and masserie you can actually live in.
What you give up
Honesty first -- Puglia has no Positano. There is no single postcard view that stops a room. If the photograph is the point of your trip, book the Amalfi Coast and make your peace with the crowds.
Puglia rewards the traveller who wants August without the crush.
What you get back
Space, mostly. A trullo estate on its own land, a stone-cut pool, a chef who comes to the house. Ostuni ten minutes away for dinner, a coastline that stays warm into October, and the sense -- increasingly rare on the Italian coast -- that you have found something rather than queued for it.