villa faraone 2puglia 2015 – prologue 5

 
villa_faraone10Rose and I spend yesterday going through restaurants, vineyards and pilgrimage sites we want to visit. The most surprising were the restaurants and gelaterie. My comment was that Derrick will love all the meat dished, Rose will like the risottos and cheeses and I will love all the vegetables and cured meats. And in Ostuni, Rose found a famous artiginal gelato maker and never mind all the options for the famous Pugliese bread.

I don’t remember having all these options when we were in Calabria. It could be that we were in Calabria early on and we didn’t know how to find things. But I’m beginning to think that tourism in Puglia is better organized than it is in Calabria. There certainly seems to be many more accommodations options than we ever found in Calabria. I probably need to decouple Puglia from the Mezzogiorno. I’m beginning to suspect that Basilicata and Calabria are on a similar tourist trajectory and that Puglia is much further ahead. There is a lot of online content for Puglia and there seems to also be a group that left, but has come back. There are several chefs that have gone back to Puglia after they made their reputations here in America.