Azzurra: in Datça, the pizzeria opened in his grandparents' old house, with Neapolis by Moretti Forni

For some twenty years, a stone house in Eski Datça, the old centre of Datça in Turkey, was the home of two English farmers. They had grown citrus in South Africa for a quarter of a century and had chosen to retire to this peninsula on the south-western Turkish coast, where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean. When they went back to South Africa, the house stood empty for a year. Since 14 August 2025 it has been home to Azzurra, an Italian restaurant with a pizzeria, run by their grandson, Alex Dursun.

«When my grandparents arrived, Datça was a quiet little village, there was very little tourism», Dursun says. «In recent years it has become a very popular destination, for foreigners and Turks alike, because it is a corner of the country that has remained untouched. A lot of restaurants and bars opened, and by then they were elderly, so they decided to leave. At that point we asked ourselves what Datça was missing. There are plenty of hotels and small guesthouses, but the restaurants work for four or five months, during the high season, and close in winter. What was needed was a good restaurant open twelve months a year, and we thought of an informal Italian place, with pizza, pasta, meat and fish».

The oven was chosen in Izmir, at a demonstration day organised by a leading Turkish distributor of Moretti Forni, where some forty restaurateurs and pizzaioli were able to see the various models at work. «We had been looking for a solution for quite some time», Dursun recalls. «There we saw how simple it was to bake a Neapolitan pizza in ninety seconds, and when the first pizza came out we said to each other that this was the oven that had to be at Azzurra. It was a five-minute decision». Today the venue works with a Neapolis, the open-mouth electric oven designed to bake Neapolitan-style pizza, classic and contemporary, to perfection.

Dursun came to the restaurant business with no professional background behind him, and with a passion born on trips to Italy in the wake of his parents, who travel there often for work. «I have been to Rome, to Milan and to many other places, and that is how I fell in love with Italian cooking», he says. «But I had never worked as a cook. I taught myself, trying recipe after recipe to perfect the dough. My father and I designed the place ourselves too, the dining room, the bar, the kitchen, with no experience at all, asking for ideas and advice from anyone who could give them to us. The house has a long history and we did not want to change it completely: it had to go on looking like an old house, and in fact we kept all the original furniture. Now I run the place with my fiancée, and I make the pizzas as well».

In its first months Azzurra served only pizza, cocktails and wine. At the beginning of 2026 the kitchen started up, entrusted to a dedicated brigade, and the venue became an à la carte restaurant with starters, salads, main courses and desserts. «It is not one hundred per cent Italian cooking», Dursun points out. «I would say it is eighty per cent Italian, and the rest comes from different ingredients and influences. Among the most requested dishes are the Controfiletto, the Linguine ai frutti di mare and a Spiedino d'agnello con fichi secchi e albicocche, tucked between one piece of meat and the next, sweet and sharp at the same time. In the Torta caprese we use almonds from our own estate, some twenty hectares near the restaurant, where we live. About eighty per cent of the vegetables and herbs come from there, basil included, and the oil too: we produce around eight hundred litres a year and we use between four and five hundred at the restaurant».

Winter, in a town that Dursun reckons has between 35,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, went up and down, but was positive all the same. The first summer, on the other hand, exceeded expectations: «For three months we turned away fifty or sixty people a day, and reservations were running four days ahead», he explains. «In the high season it is mostly Turks from Istanbul and the big cities, but we also have guests staying at the hotels in Marmaris, or coming from Bodrum, three hours away by car. Nobody here eats and leaves: a table stays for two hours, two and a half, with a starter, a salad, a main course, a dessert and a good bottle from the twenty-three French, Italian, Turkish and Spanish wines on our list. People come looking for an experience, as well as for a good plate of food».

With pizza, by contrast, Azzurra has already changed course once and is preparing to do so again. «We started with Neapolitan, but in Turkey people are not used to it yet», Dursun says. «Nine times out of ten they told us it was not baked, that the edges were raw. Here pizza is liked more baked and crisp, and so we moved to a Roman style. The best sellers now are the Pepperoni (in the American sense of the word, with spicy salami, ed.) and the one with smoked sirloin. But we are working on a new dough to go back to Neapolitan in the coming months, because here everyone makes the same pizza and we want to offer something different. We use excellent ingredients, and nobody in Datça has an oven like our Moretti Forni».

For a venue that works at full capacity all summer, the other solutions considered would have meant a more demanding operation and the risk of coming to a halt in the busiest months. «With a wood-fired oven you need someone with the right training, who watches the fire at every moment to hold the right baking temperature, and you also need someone to fetch the wood every day and keep the oven constantly clean», Dursun explains. «The Neapolis is extremely easy to use perfectly, and to maintain as well; it is reliable, it never gives us any trouble and it can be cleaned with no effort at all. It is also a versatile oven, and we can use it for other things: during a pop-up with two guest chefs we slow-cooked a veal shank in it, then served it on a risotto. I say every pizzeria should have a Neapolis, because you can bake pizza in it, cook meat, a very wide range of preparations».

The next project concerns the garden behind the grandparents' house. Azzurra now has eighty covers outdoors, and the aim is to reach at least a hundred and thirty. «It is a very beautiful space, with the olive trees and two big avocado trees that give us four or five hundred fruits a year», Dursun says. «We want to arrange the tables without touching a single plant, so that it stays natural as it is».