In the beginning

My wife and I met five years ago. Soon after that we went to Rome together which was my wife's first visit to Italy. My wife loved Italy and from this a small seed started to grow about eventually retiring there.

On our return I found the magazine Italia in a deli in Pimlico. I the first issue which I picked up they had an article about Puglia being the new Tuscany. ( ho Ho Ho ho laughs anyone who knows either province.) We also read an article

Seduced by Sicily

in one of the papers about the town of Noto in Sicily which sounded lovely.

This lead us to plan half our honeymoon in Puglia and the other half in Sicily. in Puglia we stayed at the spectacular

Masseria San Domenico

The hotel is really lovely with a huge salt water swimming pool and lots of beautiful Italians coming and going in Ferraris and helicopters. (I am not joking)

We explored Puglia quite a bit but were not very impressed. A lot of Puglia is very flat and arid with none of the greenness you normally associate with Italy. So that pretty much wrote Puglia off for us.

In Sicily we stayed at the lovely Hotel Villabelvedere to look out at views like this every morning.

We hired a car and drove down to see Noto.

Although Noto is a very special little town that is being beautifully renovated thanks to EU money, we felt that it was not for us; it seemed to be too far inland and too quiet and the closest beaches were dire.

We spent a fair amount of time driving around Sicily and although some areas are beautiful, it is not the right place for us.It has areas of outstanding beauty but it has a too many areas of outstanding concrete and crap as well. I personally was very put off by the lawless property development. Some areas look worse than the Spanish Costas.

This article describes the "development" situation in Palermo very well.

The Sack of Palermo and the Concrete Business of the Sicilian Mafia

So that was the end of Puglia and Sicily for us. Great places to visit but not for us to live.