A great question as to how we ended up here.  It wasn't by far the first place i looked.  I fell in love temporarily with at least four or five other properties.   From right in Lecce to all the way to the far southern coast.  We took the advice of our excellent agent in Salento looked far and wide and even had a couple of walk-throughs for structural warning signs and coziness factor.  Actually we started looking even before we had an agent. Here's how we found him. I'd found what I thought was my dream palace.  It was all the way down in the heel of the Italian boot; a small town called Morciano di Leuca,  just a 10 minute bike ride to the sea.  A two bedroom villa with everything on my list.  A garden, a charming kitchen, a rooftop terrace, and best of all an unfinished downstairs ripe for remodeling into a few more bedroom, media rooms, winemaking, whatever. Oh, I  see it's still for sale, dropped in price a bit as well....

Thus begins tales of our move to San Cataldo/Lecce,  Puglia fall of 2021 After 6 months of searching, falling in love, falling out of love,  hesitation, wise council, and then the "Eureka" of true love, We found the perfect place to call our own in the tiny beach town of San Cataldo ;  sitting right on the edge of the world looking out on the Adriatic sea, across the straits 100 chilometri or so to Albanian coastline, and around the corner to Greece. A tiny apartamento across the piazza from the beach and a 2,000 year old Roman pier, a remnant of it's glory days as a major import/export point for Emperor Hadrian's Rome.  Nowadays it's by degree a quiet beach town (out of season) bordering some national parkland, and miles, and miles, and miles of gorgeous coastline on bottom of the Achilles tendon of the Italian boot.   It's also only a 12 chilometri ride to Lecce, the Florence of Southern Italy, so when I grow tired of the fall/winter quiet or need to get ...