Picture a sandstone building shimmering like a mirage. Perhaps something out of Lawrence of Arabia – or maybe a creamy Moroccan fort. Then imagine honey-coloured alleyways, a piazza and a church – just built but looking as if they’ve been there for centuries. Now envisage, if you will, 93 townhouses in the style of traditional Apulian hill villages. And finally add to the mix some large villas – grand-ish residences encircled with dry stonewalls and cacti – on the outskirts of the town.

Fill the air with the scent of figs and oregano and conjure in your mind’s eye a private estate with vines growing alongside fields bursting with cherry tomatoes and aubergines. Then you have an idea of Borgo Egnazia, Italy’s smartest new offering. Most of it opened at the beginning of the year.

Borgo Egnazia is a resort in Puglia – in the stiletto heel of Italy – and a feat of vision and design. It’s a place that has opened to oohs and ahs; a venue snapped up for French Vogue fashion shoots; and to which photographers from Architectural Digest Italia and suchlike have been hotfooting it. It’s rather like a film set – with extras wafting past in Alberta Ferretti and Pucci.

It ‘s a borgo (Italian for village) and comprises La Corte – a masseria-style hotel – plus the aforementioned townhouses, villas, pools too numerous to count and a fantabulous children’s club. Its design speaks of the rural architecture of the nearby hill villages with their Greek, Goth, Norman and Spanish influences – the legacy of Puglia’s invaders.

We go inside to find a cream-on-cream minimalist dream and wow! contemporary take on the farmhouse look. There are huge tufo pots of grain (‘pile’ as they’re known,) baskets of almonds and a massive sculpture of hanging birdcages. Then there’s Vair, its spa with Roman baths – including a Tepidarium, Calidarium and Frigidarium and therapists who float around in togas and offer locally -inspired therapies.

We stay in a very comfortable 3 -bedroom villa, enjoying our own space, attentive service and a private pool. It costs 10,000 Euros a week. It’s unusual in a new villa that costs that much for the shower to drip through the kitchen ceiling and the bedroom door handle to come off in your hand. But the Chief of Maintenance – he’s included in the price – deals with these minor issues. After all this is a paradiso where they pride themselves on attention to detail.

The one thing that is faultless and beyond compare is the food. A god among culinary men is Mario Musoni, Borgo Egnazia’s Michelin-starred Executive Chef. He’s a big noise in the Slow Food movement, believes in zero food miles and takes the organic produce for his dishes from the 250-acre estate surrounding his kitchens at Borgo Egnazia. To the Italian press he’s ‘The King of Risotto’ and his pistachio ice cream with a drizzle of olive oil is the talk of tutti in Puglia.

Puglia is a top destination for gourmet travellers. It has a microclimate producing many of the world’s best ingredients, plus fresh seafood from the Adriatic and some of the most delicious cuisine in Italy. One can also enjoy, courtesy of Mario, fantastic cookery lessons – there are four staff to six pupils – who teach us to make Pizza Margherita in an al fresco wood burning pizza oven. Additionally he does Olive Oil Tastings.

Outside the resort there are a number of restaurants. Nearby is Masseria Ciminowhere we eat like Apulian royalty on holiday in the countryside. It’s a 17th century farmhouse with agricultural implements decorating the walls. Dinner is a four- course homemade buffet – simple peasant fare and all of it delicious: from taralli (like delicious olive oil shortbread,) to homemade orecchitte pasta (rabbits’ ears pasta and the region’s speciality), and baked sea bream.

Next we go to Pescheria 2 Mari in the nearby fishing village of Savelletri. (It’s a restaurant ina glass box on the harbour.) Basically it’s a fishmongers where we choose our fish which they then slice (if necessary) and give to us to eat. Sea truffles, octopus, noci (pink mussels) , slivers of sea bass… They serve only raw fish and local wine.

You can play golf on the 18-hole San Domenico Golf Course. (It’s lovely and overlooks the sea.) We also cycle 15 minutes to the ruins of the important ancient city of Egnazia – from which the resort takes its name – to see pots, skeletons, tombs, crypt and acropolis. Some of it is still unexcavated and dating back to the Bronze Age. And all in a picturesque setting beside the sea.

Further afield, we visit Alberobello, ‘The capital of trulli’ – with its Hobbit hovels with conical roofs. Here we wander through alleyways amid these small, round stone houses like so many sun-bleached beehives. Afterwards we enjoy nearby Ostuni – known as The White Town – with its Byzantine-style cathedral and citadel. In its market they sell three types of green bean (one as long as spaghetti), curious indigenous melon- shaped cucumbers and artisan-made burratta (moonballs of double cream mozzarella) plus dried tomatoes.

Among my favourite sights, however, are the olive trees that stand in serried ranks in the estate surrounding Borgo Egnazia. Enormous, ancient olive trees. They are breathtakingly beautiful.

“These trees are two hundred years old, maybe more,” says our driver.

“They’re thousands of years old,” another local tells us later. If we stick around a few hours, the trees will celebrate their millionth birthdays.

Regardless, there are 65 million of them, give or take one or two, in Puglia. And they are, indeed, many hundreds of years old. Until 2005, these olive trees emigrated in biblical numbers – as they were stolen for fashionable gardens by thieves getting £8000-ish per tree. But now they’re protected and produce gallons of delicious extra virgin oils. Forty per cent of Italy’s oil, to be precise.

We can’t take a tree home with us these days. But we take some olive oil. Our stay may end up with us tipping the bathroom scales. It may do the same to the bank balance. But it’s definitely worth it. Without a doubt we’ll be back to visit this special resort on what’s known as the Olive Coast.