Puglia: down at heel Italy steps up the glamour

The weather turned out to be glorious. But the landscape was unexpected. “Puglia is the new Umbria” two friends had said knowingly when I announced that we were going to the southeastern tip of Italy — the heel of the boot. But it’s not. Puglia is rugged, whereas Umbria is lush.

It is covered not with vineyards but with gnarled olive trees that look ghostly at dusk, like an early Van Gogh. Puglia’s considerable poverty is barely concealed behind concrete apartment blocks, warehouses and cramped ice-cream parlours. Women hand-pick crops in the fields, and the deserted beaches face a cold, blue-green Adriatic. The region’s beauty is wild and haunting, not luxurious.

Yet in one respect Puglia is, indeed, the new Umbria, or perhaps the new Algarve. Some well-concealed five-star hotels are quietly bringing in adventurous Americans and slick Milanese, who look as though they have walked off a Cond? Nast photoshoot.

Masseria Torre Coccaro, where we stayed, was the epitome of boho-chic — with a spa and chill-out rooms set within a 16th-century whitewashed Saracen watchtower. It was all stone slabs and wine-red painted wood, with evening candles flickering over Persian rugs laid out between the garden walls. Rather like an Arab souk, but one where you can read Vogue while you sip your zinfandel.

This type of place usually terrifies me when my children are around. The Masseria Torre Coccaro is designed for tranquillity — a quality that is largely incompatible with young boys. The chances of them destroying some carefully placed orchid or trendy lantern are just too high. Yet the hotel somehow managed to combine glamour with friendliness. By day two all the staff knew my children’s names.

Ottavo helped our seven-year-old to decorate a gigantic chocolate Easter egg. Almost every evening Natale asked the kitchen to make us an early supper because the children were getting too tired to stay up. Luigi bought our four-year-old a set of stabilisers so he could ride the hotel’s smallest bicycle. This he did with huge excitement — he has never owned a bike — down to see the hotel ponies and through the organic vegetable gardens.

The same thing happened at the beach. The hotel has its own beach club, with a shuttle bus to take guests there if they don’t want to cycle. It’s all dark wood, cream hammocks and white-jacketed waiters — who soon found us buckets and spades so that our sons could dig happily for hours in the sand while we lolled about accepting iced drinks.

My only regret was that the Adriatic throws up fair quantities of jetsam. And on some days, it being the beginning of the season, a bulldozer was eerily flattening the dunes behind us.

After a few days I began to feel less pale and frumpy. The sea breezes blew away the claustrophobia. Italians treated me as a precious pregnant vessel rather than a whale-like eyesore. We found a nearby tennis court where we could regain some muscle tone . We also made a few trips out into the countryside.

We saw the Trulli — extraordinary cone-shaped dwellings made of whitewashed limestone that look like Hobbit-houses. The legend is that the Trulli were easy to put up and pull down, so that their owners could demolish them if the taxman was coming.

We also saw the Castel del Monte, a castle near Bari that rises out of the plain in a perfect octagon. Even from a distance of several kilometres it looks modern, like something designed by Richard Meier. The castle was built in the 13th century by Emperor Frederick II, who clearly had both a radical architect and an ecumenical attitude. This extraordinary castle combines Gothic and Classical styles with aspects that are clearly Moorish.

The boys loved the castle, but didn’t want to do too much sightseeing. They preferred the pool at the Masseria, which was also extraordinary. It had a stone “beach” for paddling at the edges, which sloped downwards to a large deep-blue pool, big enough to do lengths.

The highlight of our trip was something that I had privately been dreading. The hotel has a cookery school, and Donato spent a morning teaching us to cook. It sounded awfully like hard work and I am not much of a cook. The boys, however, were spellbound as Donato got us to roll out pastry, make Parmigiano and do lots of gloopy things in bowls.

We even made a lemon ricotta tart of such delectability that we kept it all for ourselves rather than offer it to anyone else in the restaurant.

I didn’t feel guilty about eating the tart because we had put so much effort into its creation. I must have put on several pounds in Puglia because of the food. I ended up feeling fat but happy. Running away to Italy was the right thing to do. Puglia is on the up, and so am I.

Need to know

Getting there Citalia (0871 6640253, www.citalia.com) offers seven nights at Masseria Torre Coccaro from £3,735 for a family of four (based on two adults and two children sharing), including breakfast and return flights from Gatwick — a saving of more than £540. Transfers are not included, but car hire is recommended and is available from £30 for a day.