Southern Italy’s Puglia is luring an increasing number of celebs to its pretty towns and uncrowded beaches – and some are buying bolt-holes there. We take a closer look…

Puglia is preparing to welcome an especially high number of VIPs this summer, with Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and French President Emmanuel Macron among the famous faces you might spot there.

Ivanka Trump, who in 2015 visited the town of Alberobello, is expected to be attending the high brow wedding of a New York couple in the old fishing town of Monopoli, while Macron will be holidaying in Puglia with his wife. Other A-listers reported to have built some Puglian sunshine into their 2017 summer schedule include Tom Hanks and Madonna, who spent time there last year.

Puglia’s down-to-earth take on Italian living, combined with its beautiful sandy beaches and unspoilt towns have been attracting more discerning celebrity homeowners for some time. One of the UK’s favourite female actresses, Academy Award-winning Helen Mirren, has owned a restored 16th-Century farmhouse in the Santa Maria di Leuca area for a number of years. She uses it for down-time with her American film director husband, who is also involved with a cocktail bar there, but is not shy to be seen enjoying herself on the local beaches.

Similarly, American actress Meryl Streep is reported to have a restored property in another corner of this sun-kissed region of Italy, while French actor Gerard Depardieu owns a pad in the landmark city of Lecce, an architectural gem. Elsewhere, frontman of the British band Madness, Suggs, and fellow rock musician Paul Weller both own bolt-holes in Puglia. Not forgetting that A Place in the Sun’s founding presenter, Amanda Lamb, has bought there twice.

One of the region’s most recent A-list homeowners, or soon to be homeowner, is celebrity nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow. His third wife, Bella, is half-Italian and now that the couple have two young children together, they want a second home near Bella’s family in the Brindisi area of Puglia

As a result, millionaire Stringfellow, whose London nightclubs over the decades have been popular hang-outs for the world’s rich and famous, put his second home in Mallorca on the market and is having a villa built in a gated community in the Puglian town of San Vito dei Normanni.

San Vito dei Normanni is a short 25-minute drive from Brindisi Airport or 90 minutes from the larger Bari Airport, with both airports receiving low-cost flights from the UK. It is a lively market town with a picturesque historic centre, complete with a medieval castle overlooking the main piazza. A number of fine sandy beaches are a short drive away, including Torre Guaceto, part of a nature reserve.

The Stringfellow’s new house will also be near the beautiful Itria Valley, home to whitewashed towns like Ostuni, Ceglie Messapica, Cisternino and Alberobello, where the rows of distinctive conical ‘trullo’ houses, for which the town and region is famous, have UNESCO World Heritage status .