Flavia Caroppo
Italy Operations and Communications

Flavia comes from Bari, on Puglia’s Adriatic coast. As a child she cared less about how a house looked than about the life it allowed: who gathered at its table, how the light fell across a room at six in the evening.

That way of looking became a profession. For more than thirty years she has worked in journalism and communications, learning to ask precise questions and to rely only on what she has seen for herself.

Fifteen years in New York were a second education. There she came to understand how Americans think about a home: the privacy they expect, the level of service they are used to, the value they place on their time.

Puglia was never a place she left behind. She knows its masserie among the olive groves, its palazzi and its houses by the sea; the stone they are built from, the artisans who restore them and the towns around them, in February as well as in August.

She moves easily between those two worlds. She hears what a client is looking for, often before it has been fully said, and knows where in Puglia it exists, and where it does not.

“A photograph can show you a beautiful house. It cannot tell you how it feels to wake there, how quiet it really is, or what the road is like in winter. I think of my work as matchmaking between what a client has imagined and a place in Puglia that is real. I make the introduction only when I am sure of both.”

At fortyseventeen Advisory, Flavia directs communications and editorial content, and scouts properties on behalf of clients. She walks through the properties as though her clients were beside her, seeing what they would see, and stays with them until the day they hold the keys.