Puglia? What you wanna go there for?

I recently caught up with my older brother who, for reasons that are irrelevant to this story, I hadn’t seen for a number of years.

When I told him I was going to Italy for three months to learn Italian his immediate response was to ask “What you wanna go there for?”

My brother is 65 years old, ten years older than me, he is my mother’s son by her first marriage and part of the great post war migration to Australia in the 1950s. She married her first husband, a soldier, as World War 2 was drawing to an end in 1945. He did not survive to see the end of the war or his son.

My mother came from the city of Foggia in the region of Puglia in Southern Italy which occupies much of the calf and all of the heel of the Italian peninsular. During the war it was an important strategic railway hub linked to the ports of Bari, Brindisi, Taranto and others for the movement of troops and equipment to Greece, Africa and elsewhere.

As a result the advancing allied forces targeted Foggia with their bombers, leveling much of the city. Foggia was laid waste leaving a post war period of desperate poverty, deprivation, and hopelessness.

One of my brother’s earliest memories of Italy was visiting a family living in great poverty in what he described as a pile of rocks in the country side. The people living there brought out some bread to share. He vividly remembers olive oil being poured onto the bread and having to pick out the ants before they could eat it.

This is my brother’s Italy and he wants nothing to do with it even if the Italy of 2011 is unrecognisable from the one he left behind.

The irony is that in today’s Puglia, houses made of piles of rocks are still there. In fact there is a whole town made of them – the UNESCO listed Alberobello where the "piles of rocks" or Trulli are now highly desirable houses, chic hotels, flash restaurants and exclusive shops.

It is very unlikely that I will ever convince my brother that it is worth going to Italy. But he does pose a perfectly legitimate question – Puglia? What you wanna go there for? - something that my very supportive, friends and family would never ask.

Let’s see if I can find out – I’ve got three months to do it.