Wealthy Buyers Are Turning This Region Into One of Italy’s Hottest Home Markets

In a shaded spot near his new swimming pool, Northern Italian architect Paolo Genta is taking stock of his Southern Italian dream project—a luxurious vacation compound, serving three generations of his extended Turin family, that he created in Puglia, the region running down the heel of Italy’s boot.

On a hot spring day, over a glass of local rosé wine and tomato-and-pasta canapés, Genta, 64, remembers his initial encounter over a decade ago with the sunbaked property, which he bought in stages between 2012 and 2015, for $537,400, and then restored up through 2022.

“A friend took me here,” he says, of the 2/3-acre estate, then in ruins. “But it immediately felt familiar to me—as if I already knew it.”

He has gone on to spend around $1.075 million to realise his vision by renovating three adjacent structures, dating back to at least the 18 century, as well as $236,400 on the lavish landscaping. He and the Genta clan plan to use the compound’s seven bedrooms, spread over two buildings, up to a few months a year. The third building, a deconsecrated Baroque chapel, is the perfect place to have a cool lunch on a hot day.

Genta is one of a growing number of luxury-minded homeowners who are transforming Puglia, once a remote and impoverished corner of Italy, into an outpost of upscale living. Historical stone farmhouses, called masserie, are getting high-tech upgrades, while Puglia’s traditional cone-topped rural structures, called trulli, are being converted into high-end primary suites.

Puglia is one of the few areas of mainland Southern Italy—along with the Campania region, home to Naples and the Amalfi Coast—to develop a reliable luxury real-estate sector. According to Idealista.it, the Italian residential real-estate site, home prices here now average about $121 per square foot, which is higher than in nearby Basilicata, Calabria and Abruzzo.

Luxury properties are clustered in two areas. One, Valle d’Itria, is an agricultural valley between Bari, Puglia’s largest city, and Ostuni, an old, atmospheric hilltop town. This is ground zero for Puglia’s trulli legacy. Thousands of the structures, large and small, mark the hilly countryside, creating a distinctive, rustic skyline. Further south, around the Baroque city of Lecce, lies Salento, where Genta has his compound. Flatter and hotter, with simultaneous access to both Adriatic and Ionian beaches, Salento offers more seclusion.

Many residential buildings in Valle d’Itria, a Puglia area increasingly known for upscale homes and luxury resorts, are topped with cone-shaped trulli.

According to Idealista, Puglia’s Brindisi province, which includes much of Valle d’Itria, is seeing the region’s strongest price increases, up 9.2% between May 2022 and May 2023. The most expensive sale in 2022 was a 6,500-square-foot Salento masseria, not far from the Genta compound, which sold for $3.78 million.

Valle d’Itria is known for its white-stone towns and exclusive hotels, such as Borgo Egnazia, a 40-acre coastal resort, where high-season prices can reach $26,585 a night. Near Ostuni, a restored, trulli-topped stone house dating back several centuries has an asking price of $1.72 million; the five-bedroom home sits on a roughly 7.5-acre lot.

Valle d’Itria appeals to design royalty, such as Milan’s MariaCristina Buccellati, who works with her family’s luxury jewellery label, now owned by Richemont. Salento, meanwhile, attracts Hollywood royalty; local homeowners include actress Helen Mirren and her husband, director Taylor Hackford. In Salento, near the very bottom of the heel, a restored 12-bedroom castle, with a large enclosed garden, has an asking price of $3.56 million.

Canadian couple Alper Ozdemir and Cynthia Liu, who arrived in Puglia from Toronto in late 2021, have bought in the heart of Valle d’Itria. The active retirees, both in their early 50s, left behind Ontario’s cold climate for Puglia’s good food, warm weather and close-to-nature lifestyle, says Ozdemir.

In February 2022, they closed on a 7.5-acre farm with a trulli-topped ruin. They paid $247,000 for the property, and plan to spend about $860,000 to turn the 3,850-square-foot structure into a two-story, three-bedroom home, built around a new swimming pool.

Like many luxury buyers in the area, the couple narrowed their choice between Valle d’Itria and Salento, settling on the former. “Salento is nice in the summer,” says Ozdemir, “but people live around here year round.”

Puglia overall has become increasingly accessible. It is now part of Italy’s high-speed train network, and it has two international airports. Staying in a local rental to oversee their renovation, Ozdemir and Liu plan to use their new home, set to be completed in 2024, as a base for exploring the country.

A new set of buyers from the San Francisco Bay Area, brothers Mark and Peter Alwast, also regard their 2-acre Valle d’Itria homestead, purchased for $355,000 in September 2022, as a convenient toehold, with plans to explore Europe. The brothers, along with Peter Alwast’s life partner and Mark Alwast’s husband, expect to spend about $322,000 to renovate a 3,000-square-foot house for their retirement.

Meanwhile, they will use it as a vacation home. Despite the far longer travel time, the foursome view it as an alternative to Northern California wine country. “In Puglia you get a lot more for your money,” says Mark Alwast, 60, a designer.

Patience is often required from buyers in Puglia. Genta needed to piece together his compound from eight different owners, with some holding out for years. Retired New York attorney Ellen Bonaventura, 62, has spent the past nine years putting back together a Salento palazzo, a 30-minute drive south of Lecce, from a cluster of disparate buildings. “It was always my dream to have a house in Italy,” says the full-time Puglia resident, who estimates that she has spent $495,000 on real estate, about $3.22 million on renovation costs and around $537,000 on furniture and art, including Neapolitan and Sicilian antiques.

To-do lists tend to grow for this new round of Puglia homeowners. In 2021, Paolo Colombo, an architect based in Lugano, Switzerland, paid $1.94 million to buy two multi trulli structures on a 3.7-acre hilltop Valle d’Itria property, and then spent $2.16 million to renovate the two buildings—which required disassembling, cleaning and reassembling the massive stonework. Completed this June, the renovation will be followed soon, says Colombo, by a free-standing, latticework yoga studio and new outdoor sleeping areas, which will give his family of five a total of eight bedrooms in the main house.

Swiss-based Italian architect Paolo Colombo celebrated his birthday at his trulli-topped compound in Valle d’Itria.

Rula Al Amad and James Woods, a Milan-based, Palestinian-American couple, have expanded their Puglia portfolio. Valle d’Itria pioneers, they started in 2006, when they paid a mere $129,000 to buy a derelict set of trulli, then spent $295,000 over the following several years to create a 2,000-square-foot vacation home.

Sensing it had become too small for their family of four, the couple paid $537,000 in 2018 for a nearby derelict masseria. They then spent about $1.57 million on a gut renovation, which wrapped up this spring. The finished compound can comfortably sleep up to 10.

Speaking in her new living room, which emphasizes the 500-year-old masseria’s use of historic local limestone, Al Amad, who first stayed in the house this past Easter, is looking ahead to winter. “We go to Michigan at Christmas but come back to Italy for New Year’s,” she says of the routine of her Midwest-born husband and their two teenage boys. “I can see doing a big New Year’s Eve party here.”

As a competitive rower in my long-ago prime I sometimes used a racing strategy called fly and die. Sprinting to an early lead often yielded a fast overall time, even if I couldn’t hold my torrid pace through the finish line.

Some professionals take a similar approach to their desk jobs, starting their workdays with a 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift. They are up before the sun—and, more important, before their co-workers—to get a jump on the workday and impress the boss.

Nothing screams go-getter like a predawn email! Getting stuff done early allows them to clock out midafternoon and still look like stars, even if their routines require Ben Franklin-esque sleep schedules and vats of caffeine.

Melissa O’Blenis rises by 4:30 a.m. for prayer and Peloton time before starting her job at the digital consulting firm Argano.

“I just love checking things off my list,” she says. “I need that focus time away from Teams messages, email notifications and text alerts.”

A mother with two sets of twins, O’Blenis, 48, often breaks for her kids’ afternoon sports without feeling guilty or judged. Colleagues jokingly call her Granny because her 9 p.m. bedtime makes the early starts possible. But Granny got the last laugh when she was promoted to a director-level role in March.

More than 90% of knowledge workers want to flex their hours, according to surveys by Slack’s Future Forum . In the pandemic many of us got in the habit of handling personal commitments during standard business hours, then catching up on work tasks later .

Now that the office battle is largely over, fighting a return to rigid, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedules might be workers’ last stand. But managers complain about afternoon dead zones when employees are out of pocket.

The solution for more workers is starting sooner instead of finishing later. Workflow software maker Asana reports that 21.4% of users are logging on between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. this year, up from 19.8% in 2021. About 12% of work tasks are completed before 9 a.m., the company says, compared with 10% before the pandemic.

Early-bird bosses

Gibran Washington and his basketball teammates at Hofstra University used to run at 6 a.m. He maintained his early wakeups while climbing the ranks in food-and-beverage management.

By 9 a.m. meetings, he had already exercised, meditated and put in a couple of hours of work.

“I always found myself more prepared than my colleagues who hadn’t had their first cup of coffee yet,” says Washington, 40, who doesn’t drink coffee. Now he is chief executive of Ethos Cannabis, a chain of 12 dispensaries in three states, and rises as early as ever.

Waking and working ahead of the pack is a common CEO habit, from Apple ’s Tim Cook to General Motors ’ Mary Barra . Even if your ambitions are less grand than the corner office, starting early could help you stand out for one simple reason: The boss is probably up, too, and taking notice.

Matt Kiger says being the first one into the office helped him catch his manager’s eye and advance after changing careers from education to media sales. He would set his alarm for 5 a.m., hop a train from Connecticut to New York and be at his workstation before 7.

“I thought, ‘What is it going to take to break through?’” he recalls. “‘It’s going to take being there when my boss comes in, already at my desk making phone calls.’”

Now a senior vice president for digital sales at Townsquare Media , Kiger, 47, says much of the daily communication among company leaders happens by text and phone from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. It’s possible to succeed as a night owl, he says, but people who sleep in risk missing a window when many executives are awake and accessible. While some working parents can’t swing early-morning meetings, others like Kiger say they are the key to being present at kids’ after-school activities.

Getting the worm

Matt Sunshine—whose surname surely predestined him to be a morning person—wakes at 5:30 a.m. to read the news. Then he cycles or takes a Pilates class and is on his computer by 7.

Sunshine is CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy in Tampa, Fla., which helps healthcare, media and professional-services companies generate leads. He doesn’t expect his 55 employees to follow his schedule but says it becomes progressively harder to get his attention as the day goes on and his calendar fills up with meetings. He also tries to log off by 5:30 p.m. for family time, so working after hours won’t necessarily make an impression.

“If you want to get my attention, a good time to get me is first thing in the morning,” Sunshine, 55, says. “Because people know I’m an early riser, I think that does influence other people to do the same.”

Elvi Caperonis’s morning routine is next-level organised. Her alarm rings at 6 a.m. She goes for a run at 6:30. At 7 she showers and eats breakfast. At 7:30 she opens her laptop and sets a timer for 25 minutes. That’s her first block to focus on the most important task of the day before a five-minute break. She repeats the on-off work pattern throughout the day.

Caperonis, a technical program manager at Amazon , makes a daily to-do list with nine items. She rates one critical, three medium-level and five lower-priority. This helps her work efficiently and in the right order.

The 41-year-old works from home in Florida and often picks her daughter up from school at 2:30 p.m., freedoms she has preserved partly by being highly productive early in the day, she says. Much of her job involves identifying potential risks to a project’s success, and when she sends an early-morning alert it arrives really early for company leaders in the Pacific time zone.

“They appreciate having that information first thing when they open their email,” she says. “In my experience, leaders are also early birds.”

Wealthy Buyers Are Turning This Region Into One of Italy’s Hottest Home Markets

Once an impoverished area, Puglia has seen an influx of high-end buyers willing to spend millions on historic farmhouses and villas

Working a regular day, even into the evening, is for mere mortals. Those out to impress start well before dawn.

Early-bird bosses

Getting the worm