Some decisions take years to make. Others take a single moment — a coffee, rain on the window of a Milan apartment, and a question neither of us expected to ask out loud.
Ours was the second kind.
We are Carlo and Gloria. Until two years ago, we lived the “normal” life of Milan: work, the metro, weekends that felt too short, holidays planned months in advance just to make them count. Then one summer, during a trip through Salento, we stopped to look at the sea in Ugento — that color that isn’t quite blue, not quite green, somewhere between the white of the sand and the wild Mediterranean scrub — and we said the sentence that changed everything: “What if we just stayed?”
It wasn’t a romantic escape without a plan. We sold our home, our furniture, most of what we had built over years of life in Milan. We left stable jobs for pure uncertainty. Friends and family looked at us with that familiar mix of admiration and quiet concern reserved for people making “slightly crazy” choices.
Today we live in Ugento, in the heart of lower Salento, just minutes from some of the most beautiful — and least talked about — beaches in Puglia: Torre San Giovanni, Punta Fanò, and the dunes of Ugento that look like fragments of desert facing the sea.
This blog was born right here: from the desire to tell the real Puglia, the one lived every day, not just the postcard version of August. We’ll write about hidden villages, backroads, van life and tent camping, what it really means to move south and start from zero, slow travel and outdoor adventures, food, craftsmanship, and the people who make this land what it is.
We’re not a travel guide. We’re two people who chose to live here, and who keep learning something new about this beautiful, complicated land every single day.
Welcome to our Salento.
