Benvenuti al Sud.  About as sud as it’s possible to get in Italy.  Puglia, famous for olives, beaches and as a contributor in the demise of a South Australian Labour Premier, promised to be a stony, barren place sweltering under a hot sun with little to recommend other than being the place we were to spend a week with G’s uncle and auntie in their holiday home.  The reality was pleasantly different.  Sure it had rocks… and olives… and cacti… but it also had a charm and friendliness that reminded me of the country town in which I was raised.  The type of place that on Day 1 you wonder why anyone would bother to visit but by Day 7 you don’t want to leave.  The spiritual home of concrete I termed it for the first few days until realising that the local stone is the same colour as concrete… there was still a lot of concrete though.

The old part of town consists of a castle and winding, narrow streets and walkways very like Venice, minus the canals.  The usual array of tourist shops exist containing local arts and crafts designed to entrap wives and ensure husbands spend plenty of time standing forlornly in the street gaining an ever more expensive Mediterranean tan pondering the negotiations necessary to avoid the inevitable excess baggage charges.  Just how many pairs of sandals should be considered enough?  Still, there was always the food to take your mind off things.  Gelato shops, excellent pizza and freshly made pasta all add up to additional reasons to pull on the sandshoes each morning to run off the excess intake from the evening before.  Not helped of course by G’s auntie Silvana’s capacity for cooking and her powers of persuasion for eating just a bit more.

Days were spent at the beach about 20km north of the town where, progressively through the week, there were more and more people as the weather warmed up and the wind died down.  It was never entirely calm.  In fact I’d have to say Otranto could well be in the running for one of the consistently windiest places I’ve been.  Maybe we just got it on a particularly windy week.  Lunch at the beach each day, for me at least, involved an open tuna, tomato, cheese and olive sandwich on very odd, but very tasty bread called Friselle. With lots of olive oil over the whole thing the bread still retained its crunchy crust, which in some places required a lot of chewing.  Fantastic stuff.  It makes my triple cooked toast, which also retains some crunch regardless of  how much the butter melts on it, look like amateur hour.  Ah, there is a website that is all about 20 different Italian breads that has it:  http://italicious.wordpress.com/20-breads-of-italy/  Just need the recipe now… and probably the patience of a saint to knead the dough long enough to make it.

We also had the pleasure of the company of our friends from LA who were in Italy for a cruise for a couple of days in Otranto.  G’s uncle Georgio drove us all the way (200 km) to Brindisi and back to pick them up.  Thankfully they are fairly easily amused (they must be to be our friends) so a weekend in Otranto with not much to do but spend time at the beach, or drink beer at a seaside bar, or eat gelato, or go out to dinner, or spend time wandering into tourist craft shops… (Nooooo!)… didn’t phase them and we all had a great time.

With one last day in Otranto we were booked in for dinner at a place that specialises in km zero food.  This takes slow food to its final, tasty extension.  Everything that is eaten in the restaurant is grown in the gardens that surround it.  Probably one of the highlights of the trip.  Of all the meals we ate in Italy this was the tastiest and one of the more expensive… but still entirely reasonably priced when compared to the price of food in Stockholm.  The meal defied the normal order of courses.  Food kept coming out and we kept eating.  Faba beans – I’ve never eaten tastier.  Tomato like you remember it tasting as a kid.  Mozzarella so fresh you are forced to look nervously over your shoulder for the buffalo.  This place was the type specimen for less is more when it comes to food.  I’ve always said that a few, good, simple flavours done well are the essence of the best food.  Try a good Italian Margherita pizza alongside a Super Supreme Several Hundred Toppings pizza and you’ll see what I mean.  This place was as far away from Pizza Hut as it’s possible to get although the woman who ran it looked like she was around when pizza was invented.   Highly recommended.