Early Bird Season Love in the land of the lothario

Kevin Pilley raises a glass to romance in Rudolph Valentino’s home town

The premise of our Italian break was romance. A celebration of marriage. Something special to mark an anniversary. So we had discounted the container port of Taranto and kept the hand-in-hand walk around Bari airport to a minimum.

It was consensual. We had had enough cultural enrichment. Lecce, the forts and the rubble we had done. Neither of us have ever been that interested in Swabian castles. That’s why we have been married so long. We don’t like to see each other on beaches any more either.

My wife got out the guidebook and riffled away for a suitably seductive destination.

“Perfect!” She unfolded a map and studied it like a reflexology chart.

One siesta later, we embarked on our tour of Puglia, a couple of middle-aged foot fetishists exploring the heel of Italy and a bit of its instep.

After miles of gnarled trees, dry-stone walls, scruffy fields, endless mozzarella farms and pomegranate groves, annoyingly innumerable olive oil mills 200 species of fig and only getting badly lost umpteen times, we eventually bumped to a hot-and-bothered halt. Above a deep gorge.

“Another ravine,” I said, unimpressed. Italian-born American heartthrob Rudolph Valentino (above); Lungomare Otrantino in Puglia (above and right). “Puglia is not known as the Land of Ravines for nothing.” My wife told me it was no ordinary ravine. It was the gravina ravine belonging to Castellaneta, 32km from Taranto. The name rang a bell. We parked and walked down the town’s Via Roma. My wife looked more than usually smug. “Does the name Rudolfo Alfonso Raffaelo Pierre Filberto Gugliemi di Valentine D’Antonquolia mean anything to you?” I shrugged and guessed he played for Juventus. Then we stopped at Number 116, a non-descript three-storey white house among many similar. My wife smiled. The way she sometimes does. “Rudolph Valentino was born here. In 1895. Now how romantic is that?” The site of pilgrimage is not open to the public but the life-size statue of “Valentino” around the corner is. As is a laundrette, a hotel and a restaurant bearing his name. Naturally, there’s also a Rudolph Valentino Museum. Ironically, it is a former convent. We entered its “Lovers’ Hall”. Under the barrelled-ceiling, we were followed (rather ambisexually I thought) by the eyes of the legendary Latin lover and epitome of romance. From film posters and black and white movie stills, wearing his Cossack, matador and gaucho