Ostuni, My Beloved Hometown in Southern Italy

Never in my life did I enjoy living somewhere like I did Ostuni. It was funny really - newly married, naive & a very inexperienced second lieutenant at tech training in San Angelo, I saw the Intelligence Command's magazine, the "Spokesman."  I still have a copy, it was a 1985 issue, some time between April-July. On the cover was this famed white city on the hill. One of the sergeants who taught the course and had been assigned to the local unit showed it to me - at that point, everyone knew where I was headed.  Ostuni is located between Bari and Brindisi, in the province of Puglia (Apulia), in the heel of the Italian boot...right on the Adriatic Sea.

Information on Ostuni and the Puglia area can be found on their provincial website:
 http://www.emmeti.it/

I remember looking at that photo and the singular determination came to me, I was going to live there.  I fell in love with the place, just looking at that picture. Over the next few months, many people tried to talk us out of it...a villa would be prone to theft, it was too far off, no Americans lived there - yadda yadda yadda!

Well, if anything, I'm a stubborn sort & when we arrived, I refused to even consider anything outside Ostuni.  I refused to even look at other villas or apartments in nearby villages and towns.  As luck would have it, there was a single villa listed and the  one we looked at was what we ended up with. It lay atop a hill, at the end of this small neighborhood to the right side of highway SS16 as you were heading into town, before the curve to the left. The address was listed as Contrada Santo Magno and it looked to the Villa Speccia in front, and off over many acres of fields and hills toward Carovigno to the back. It was a beautiful whitewashed stucco, 3 bedrooms, the obligatory rooftop patio and a large patio on the ground floor. The gardens were gorgeous and the fields were to be worked by the landlord's laborers. He assured us we were welcome to any fruit or vegetables we wanted to pick ourselves.