Villa Del Palme

We flew with Ryanair, which cost roughly £50 return for each of the four of us, plus about £20 extra for our under-2-year-old.

At Brindisi airport, the friendly staff on the Maggiore counter had a car ready for us (I had rung them about two days previously to book a car), and we were pleasantly surprised to get a Renault Scenic for about the same price the other firms were hiring out Fiat Puntos, etc...

We drove to the Caravan Park at Villanova (Ostuni) where they had the keys for us for the Villa (booked through bbcasevacanze.it), despite the late hour (it was after 9pm by this stage). We collapsed into our beds and slept very well indeed. We woke up and found ourselves under a big blue sky, in a lovely modern white-washed villa.

The next morning, we got up and strolled the 150m down to the beach, where it was mainly rock, but with some small patches of sand which the children loved, or course. In the end we found a fantastic beach a couple of km to the south of Villanova, near a small village immediately to the North of Santa Sabina. This beach was clean, protected, and had plenty of sand - there was also a very cool and well-equipped bar practically on the beach where I bought the kids ice-creams, but where I could have had a few drinks with the locals, who were mostly young and friendly, listening to the tasteful music they were playing (REM, U2, INXS, that kind of thing).

Villanova has a fantastic bakery, and around the corner a good Pesceria which sold nice fresh fish. The Pizzeria ("Torre") was absolutely top-notch, and we spent pleasant balmy evenings sitting at the port sided eating their delicious pizzas which were simple, and only cost 3-4 euros each.

Ostuni, about 7 km inland, was lovely, especially the old town, and the Gelateria in the central park had the best ice-cream my kids have ever tasted. We bought a painting in the old town which looks great on the kids bedroom wall.

We drove around 1,000km in the course of our 9 days, and the kids enjoyed the Safari Park at Fasano, we liked Lecce, Alberobello, and the countryside in between, but by far and away the best was Matero : the location where some of Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus was filmed. We stayed overnight in the hotel where Mel Gibson stayed, got up at the crack of dawn and had a big walk around the town side of the old town, which is quite spectacular - great views down into and across the big gorge, with innumerable limestone caves visible all about. After breakfast we drove to the other side of the gorge to have a closer look and a walk around the steep paths down to the caves.

A great holiday, the locals were very friendly (when you made an effort to speak a few words to them), the food was simple, healthy, delicious and very very cheap (the local beer was only 39 cents in the supermarket!), and the weather was gorgeous, if verging a bit on the too-hot side of things by the last couple of days....