In pursuit of perfezione

Ostuni is very easy to visit by motorhome. In Italy this is rare, either access roads are asphalted donkey tracks, drivers consumed by murderous intent or you are squeezed into crowded sostas with small pitches among gnarled olive trees with low branches designed to dint any vehicle larger than a Fiat 500. With Ostuni it was easi-peasy all the way. We found an expansive, perfectly flat public car park next to the whitewashed town's ancient walls. It  only cost €5.00 to sleep overnight. 

We had a plan, we always do and as ever it didn't quite work out. Aside from appreciating the picturesque town the main reason for being here was to eat a sandwich. We are not talking about something prepackaged and half frozen like you get in M&S Food, what we were eagerly anticipating was a World Heritage standard sarnie - a Puglian 'puccia. After some considerable time spent on TripAdvisor and Google map's reviews we concluded that Ostuni's top-notch puccia place was a hipsterish looking establishment called Monna Lisa Caffè.

We knew it was up a side street near the town hall, to the right of a big column.

 It took some finding. It was as hipsterish in reality as its website promised. On a narrow street, opposite a dark doorway we found a clutch of low tables with even lower cushioned stools, each table had a dog-eared book on it, a nice touch I felt, to feed the mind as well as the body. We sat down. Eventually a slender individual with a vague expression appeared out of the shadowy doorway and handed us the cocktail menu (the place's cocktails are as well reviewed as its pucce). When we asked for the food menu we were advised that the kitchen did not open for another half an hour. Too long, we were starving, the only thing we had eaten all day was a sad croissant in the Grimaldi ferry cafeteria at about 7.30am. 

We were just going to have to wing it so far as choosing our pucci place. In the piazza next to Colonna di Sant'Oronzo there was plenty of choice, at random we settled on 'Drogheria Pugliese'.

How do you choose? All the pucce seemed equally delicious. In the end with or without chilli peppers was the decider, I'm avoiding chilli as it seems to react badly with my meds, Gill, all things being equal, leans towards 'a bit of heat'.

I went for 'Fogliarella', Gill chose 'Follifuoco' and we shared a bowl of fries with a mayonnaise dip. Both pucci were delicious, sparking off a conversation on the importance of 'squidge'. The quality should be showcased we agreed, imagining some kind of Christmas cookbook sensation celebrating squidgy dishes from across the globe. 

Noon is definitely very early for us so far as beer o'clock is concerned , but hey, it was our first morning in Puglia, it would have been ill-mannered to ignore the local craft beer on offer. They were just right.

Pucci ticked off, next we went in search of the perfect espresso macchiata. Ostuni's historic centre looks like a meringue, a white conical concoction plopped atop a steep hill. The narrow streets are a maze, but you know if you keep heading upwards you will reach the pinnacle eventually, occupied as you might expect by Cattedrale Santa Maria Assunta. 

The place is something of a tourist trap, particularly lower slopes where the streets are full of crappy gift shops, so many we failed to find anywhere to have a coffee. We struggled onwards, our early start, the uneven pavements and steep hills making it hard going. Further up was less frequented, more of a residential area, especially the narrow lanes to the rear of the cathedral. We got lost and never did find the front of it.

However, at the far end of a narrow alley we did stumble across a café. The upper streets of the centro storico seem to be some kind of conservation area with minimal signage allowed and no modern street furniture. 

Bar Perso side stepped the regulations by affixing a sign on the wall facing the panoramic view from its tiny terrace, not great as a marketing ploy, attractive only to pigeons. However, the way the place maximised the commercial potential of the adjacent narrow alley was more enterprising, no tables and chairs, instead a dozen or more grey bean bags strewn long the cobblestones and down the steps.

We headed for the bar stools on the small terrace. The bar was top was simple, a bare plank fixed to the stone parapet covered in bright tiles decorated with modernist inspired line drawings, a kind of Picasso-lite.

Our two espresso macchiata arrived in cups equally stylish, you got the sense it was all carefully curated, the entire place was very cool. The vista was not cool at all, it was stupendous, a forest of olive trees stretching all the way to the deep blue Adriatic, a very humanised landscape, profoundly inhabited for at least three millennia.

Bar Perso was one of those places where we look at each other, but no longer need to say 'its really civilised here'. Because we know. We asked for the bill, €4 00 for two coffees, very civilised and inexpensive - perfezione?

Not quite, we were still a few steps away from perfection. We required delicious gelato. As you probably guessed we had already undertaken a thorough gelateria audit before we arrived in Ostuni. After some deliberation we had concluded that Cremeria alla Scala was the most promising, all we had to do was find it. Google maps does not cope well with hilly places, if somewhere is 50m distant horizontally but 30 metres away vertically the app goes into 'does not compute' mode. We had no option, we had to rely on common sense, always a last resort - 'Cremeria alla Scala', scala means 'steps', here's some steps, I wonder if the cremeria is at the bottom of them... Of course it was.

And did the place deserve its 4.6, rating? Of course it did, higher even... perfezione!