Trulli, Madly, Deeply

Rustic charm, great food, a classy beach club – Puglia has everything we love about Italy, minus the hordes of tourists,  says Zoe Williams ...

 

PUGLIA IS the new Tuscany. So much is conveyed by that sentence – the food will be tasty; you won’t meet Tony Blair; you won’t even meet anyone English; you definitely will not find yourself on exactly the same town-to-town perambulation as another English couple with the same guidebook.

My mother and I traversed Umbria once, in a slightly dislocated version of Room With a View, in which she was much more skittish than Maggie Smith, and I was much less delightful than Helena Bonham Carter. We went from Gubbio to Spoleto to Trevi – we did it exactly as the Rough Guide instructed. I don’t even think they meant us to go in that order, I think it was alphabetical.  Nevertheless, two very nice seeming English couples were on exactly the same trail, in the same restaurants, at the same hotels. They eventually became friends with each other. My mother refused to talk to them,  on the basis that there’s nothing worse than a middle-class person on holiday, unless you happened to be us.

Anyway, that won’t happen to you in Puglia, which is in the heel of Italy, an area so undiscovered that only the Italians themselves have discovered it. This is where they take their holidays, apparently. I couldn’t vouch for that, since it’s hard to tell a holidaying Italian from one at work, with all their scheduled napping.

You fly into Brindisi, and you get out of it as soon as you can, since although it sounds like a town from a disco song, which will sooner or later mention pina coladas and pretty girls, it is actually a depressed port town that, from the wrong side of the army base, looks like 1980s Monchengladbach (I’ve never actually been to Monchengladbach,  I’m just trying to think of somewhere else with a lot of army bases). Travel in any direction, however, and you’ll shortly hit some or all of the things that make the place famous; in no particular order,  these are the masseria, great farmhouses converted into hotels;  the trulli, which are funny little dwellings shaped like beehives; the centuries-old olive trees and assorted pretty landscapes;  and the amazing food. Some large percentage, which I would look up if I thought you’d remember it, of all Italy’s olive oil, fish and pasta comes from this region. They cannot mess up food if they try; you don’t even have to order from menus – most of the time you just smile like a person who wants something tasty, and they’ll bring you something tasty.

Masseria Torre Coccaro makes only the briefest nod to its farmhouse past, in the sense that they still keep chickens and artfully whitewash their interiors,  but it’s much more high end than that. Think of a St Tropez beach club – now remove the snooty service and the hilarious French over-pricing,  make the food less fussy and better, and you have Coccaro’s beach club. The hotel is in the same mould, having cherry picked the best stuff from the posh Euro holiday scene, but taken out the oppressive poshness. It has a cookery school and a golf course, a swimming pool and a spa; it is the perfect couples holiday forcouples who don’t want to talk to each other. No, what am I saying? You can talk to eachother if you like, but you have an option on learning how to make mozzarella instead.

Marginally more formal is the Villa San Martino, 16km away in Martina Franca, where the restaurant is like a gentleman’s club, and everybody whispers over the speciality ham. Again,  though, the place is charming – spick, aristocratic grounds,  understated luxury, long,  swanky swathes of gravel . . . .  these are brilliant, sprawling,  generously structured buildings;  I’m sure there are ways a hotelier could go wrong, with one of these, but nobody seems to have done.

The nearest town is Locorotondo, which translates as  ‘‘the round place’’ though it seemed no rounder to me than either of its neighbours, so I can only guess it bagged the name first. The characteristic townscape is more minimal than northern Italy – teeny, whitewashed medieval streets that seem surreally scaled-down, as if you’re just about to be chased by a giant rabbit. All it needs is some sinister red graffiti and you could cast yourself back to the exciting era of the Black Death.

Alberobello is more bustling, and fractionally more famous, since it’s the trulli capital of the world.  Now, a word on these trullis – their funny shape is on account of the fact that they were built without using cement, so that when the tax collectors arrived,  they could be swiftly dismantled and turned into a heap of bricks in a field. Nobody pays tax on heaps of bricks. Alberobello is bizarrely lively – we got there at 11 on a Sunday night, to find a crammed street market full of walnuts and trainers and pyjamas, and ruminated openmindedly about how, while we could imagine needing some pyjamas at nearly midnight, it was an eccentric time to be doing your nut-shopping.

The poppy of the area is Ostuni, the largest of the towns,  as well as the most intricate and beautiful. It is just lovely – narrow streets, higgeldy steps,  heaving with restaurants, full of younglings who put our nation to shame with their poise and civilisation. Trattoria del Galousie is where the ‘‘bring us anything, just make it tasty’’ facial expression was perfected,  and this is what we got: some crazy, delicious, distant relation of a cheese souffle; little hand grenades of tasty pork; sundry unbelievable mushrooms and aubergines; cheese croquettes,  which weren’t like a school dinner at all; local raw fish – quite a big deal in southern Italy, not just in Japan as previously supposed; about 19 other things; now feeling rather full; haven’t made it on to the pasta yet; how do they fit it all in?; what fresh marvel is this,  another course, you say? My boyfriend started to make a low moaning noise, like he was in the early stages of labour.

There are downsides to an area this undiscovered – some of the apparently charming towns,  Pescichi, for instance – are indeed charming, but walk 20m,  look at the sea, look at the rocky outcrops, wonder how many years they’ve got before the clifftop houses fall into the sea, have a nice-cream and you’ve seen it all, in about six minutes.

Likewise, the masseria aren’t uniformly advanced in the art of hostelry; the third we saw, Don Sante, was a bit like a detention centre, though to be honest, the food was so good it’s possible they were keeping the décor spartanso as not to distract.  Mainly, though, Puglia is like the rest of Italy, without that slightly theme-park, on-a-plate tang that places get when tourists like them too much.

Maybe its architecture is a little more Moorish; maybe its food is a little more moreish; otherwise,  it’s all the things you love about the country, only more so, being so unspoiled.

– GUARDIAN