We first travelled to Puglia nine years ago. But then we fell in love with Sicily, which we have visited in the years since, discovering new places and revisiting old favourites. This summer we decided it was time to try something else, so we went back to Puglia.
It had all the ingredients of our favourite kind of holiday: sunshine, the sea, Italian food, interesting sites and, most importantly, time together.
The last time we visited, I wrote about how much I enjoyed wandering around the towns with my cameras. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that our youngest, who was eleven then, wasn’t especially interested in stopping while I took photographs. Nine years later, he was just as happy wandering the streets alongside his girlfriend, with a camera himself. It was a lovely reminder that while many of the places felt reassuringly familiar, we had all changed.
Susan Sontag wrote that photographs are a way of collecting the world. Returning to Puglia reminded me that photographs also collect time. The streets were much as I remembered them, as was the way I looked at them. But the people walking beside me were different.
