The Pugliese country life has two sides, an exuberant side but certainly also a watchful side. In our eyes, the trullos and country houses are often equipped with an excessive amount of lattice work for the windows and doors, barking aggressive guard dogs and camera systems. An impregnable fort; especially if outside the holiday season many houses are uninhabited you will notice that.

Organized crooks
In southern Italy apparently organized crook gangs are active from the former Eastern bloc countries. Romanians and certainly the Albanians are notorious because they would engrave signs in gates and walls that contain relevant information about the house. Thanks to its location over the centuries, Puglia has proved to be a transitional area between the Evening Land, the Orient and the Balkans. Looting is part of it.

Nicole and I, dressed in a holiday outfit with flip flops, do not seem such an organized crook at first sight, but it can of course be a perfect disguise for impending doom.

Chainsaw
During our search, for example, we once accidentally got close to his trullo, but it is still clear to the 80-year-old Italian farmer. Equipped with a chainsaw with the engine running, he continued to haunt us while we had already chosen the hare path in reverse. Maybe he just invited us to come and taste the olive oil, who knows.

Moving is not easy
Moving is never easy, we know that all too well. We have done it before. Relocation requires you to make choices. Postponing something is not part of that, geomaniacs, as we often hear from our workmen. We have decided to spend the summer months mainly in Puglia and the rest of the year in Maastricht.

We therefore do not become residential. As a result, we cannot claim any tax refund with regard to the purchase of the house.

The mainly Balinese design that we take from our former home store often causes a scrabble behind the ear for Italian movers, accompanied by catzeze when a palm-wood chair comes out of the trailer. Everything from the trailer must be transferred to smaller lorries and then drive to trullo via bumpy sandy roads.

Burglars
We decide not to sleep between the boxes that evening and to put things in order in the coming days. It is cold and it is raining on the fifth day after the move to Martina Franca as we approach our trullo that morning. To our surprise, we see socks, clothing and a silver suitcase outside. There was a burglary that night, that soon becomes clear. There is a perfect footprint on our cement floor outside the kitchen window. Buddy 43 as it turns out when I put my shoe next to it. A window is forced. These first uninvited guests in our future Bed & Breakfast in Martina Franca appear to have left without writing anything in the guestbook. The house was already a mess when leaving the night before, but now the chaos is complete. All closed boxes were knocked over, cupboards knocked down. This has clearly been a search for cash.

We stand awkwardly looking at the shoe prints in front of the trullo when we hear a neighbor coming. He has also been burgled. He shows the camera images of poor quality on his phone. As soon as the alarm goes off in the video, a man jumps directly out the window into the blackberry bushes. The colleague who is on the lookout outside pulls him out of the bushes and they stumble out of sight together. However, the faces are not clearly visible.

The loot
The neighbor immediately makes the link to our showy move, since nothing had happened on the Strada la Grotta in the last 35 years. An empty box of strawberries and 3 empty bottles of Aperol were left in the neighbour's yard; exactly the content of our poorly stocked refrigerator. So this was the loot. A sense of guilt takes hold of itself and the butcher does not want to leave it at that. With the names of our movers in his pocket, he goes to the police station.

Penance on the bare feet
A few weeks later I think of the burglars as we watch the procession in Taranto on a Thursday. The Sacri Misteri is a tour through the old city organized by brotherhoods. Armed with a wooden ratchet, detroccola, and a hood over the head, dozens of men walk around churches through the city center. The cap has two tiny holes the size of the hole of a hole punch. Penance on the bare feet. "That would be a suitable punishment for the cowardly burglars," I think. Or carrying about 100 kilos of a cross on Good Friday during the mystical procession of Francavilla Fontana. Penance for the advanced. Accompanied by the sound of the "trenula", it then goes barefoot and barefoot forward to finally celebrate the resurrected Christ on Easter Sunday. Then you eventually earned an Aperol.

And perhaps we have also earned this warning after our flashy move. The men who assisted with our move were interrogated by the police. All shoes present in their houses are checked at the bottom. The investigation is an important signal anyway, the neighbor says.

We are a bit more confident in our shoes thanks to our neighbor, who took the matter seriously. It is not for nothing that they say in the heel of the boot: rather an alert neighbor than a distant friend.