Puglia

A couple of weeks ago we hired a car and drove down to Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot) with Claude and Jane, a couple that we have become goods friends with. Jane has worked in Taranto helping to project manage the development of a big new Container Port there and so has good contacts and is interested in buying a house in the area. Puglia is the market garden of Italy, being its largest producer of wine and olive oil, as well as having a big fishing industry. It is also the home of the Trullo – little round stone houses with pointed roofs which are built in clusters and are becoming very fashionable with holidaymakers and foreign investors. They are cute little buildings which often verge on the impossibly quaint – the town of Alberobello has thousands of them and frankly looks like nothing more nor less than Hobbiton.

Our time was spent in an exhausting blur of house viewing and sightseeing, followed by leisurely debriefings over dinner in local restaurants. Parts of Puglia have a curiously English feel, full of meandering country lanes and dry stone walls and overall the area feels both more friendly and sophisticated than neighbouring Calabria. The food is very good – the standard routine in the restaurants is to bombard one with at least ten different anti-pasta dishes of fresh cooked seafood and vegetables, so that it is physically impossible to eat any main courses. House prices are also very low. So much so that Claude and Jane actually made an offer on a detached five bedroom villa overlooking the Gulf of Taranto, which has now been accepted. The deal will be done in a couple of weeks time when they hand over the cash.

We were also very tempted. We fell particularly for a smallish house nestled in olive groves about three miles from the small town of Locorotondo. It’s an old stone building with a discrete modern extension, with all mod cons, including central heating (it snowed while we were down there). It has two or three bedrooms a big patio and a Cantina, which is used to store olive oil and wine and is complete with several massive pottery urns. It also has 3,500 square metres of land (an area about sixty metres by sixty metres) full of mature and well cared for olive, fruit and nut trees. What’s more, Ryan Air have just started daily flights from London to Bari which is about forty minutes drive away. The price? Well, a lot less than a studio flat in Basildon.

So, Puglia has given us a lot to think about. Sue is now about to start a one month full time Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in Rome, so we can’t make any decisions until that’s over. But, who knows, we may pop down again to Puglia and make an offer on that house or something like it. If nothing else the possibility of a more self-sustaining lifestyle is beginning to emerge – cruising Greece, Turkey and Croatia in the Summers, funded by a bit of holiday letting, with Sue doing some teaching in the Winter and maybe me doing two or three months consultancy (if anyone will still want me).

We shall see.