Why Puglia's palazzi hotels are perfect for a post-lockdown holiday

Palazzo Daniele
Palazzo Daniele

With its long summers and even longer coastlines, Puglia offers the perfect antidote to weeks of lockdown under Fair Albion’s grey skies. The many glitterati seduced by this area in recent years has transformed the once stout and sensible heel of Italy into a chic and sexy stiletto.

Reflecting its new look, the latest hotel trends here breathe contemporary style into historic palazzi – stately residences from the heyday of Apulian splendour.

To escape the holiday crowds, head down to Gagliano del Capo, just a pebble’s throw from the cape that divides the Adriatic and Ionian seas. From the headland, on a clear day, you can see the little Greek island of Othonoi and the Albanian coast. Gagliano is well off the tourist radar – an indolent place to laze in the adagio rhythms of provincial Italian life.

The grandest building in town, Palazzo Daniele, opened to visitors last year, though from the moment you knock at its monumental doors (where any form of a hotel sign is conspicuous in its absence), you’ll feel less like a tourist and more like a guest of the owner. Francesco Petrucci – a Gatsby-like figure who lives in a wing of the palace, “among the whisperings and the champagne” – inherited this imposing porticoed pile from his ancestors, the patrician Daniele family. Built at the end of the Risorgimento – the revolutionary period so poignantly evoked in Lampedusa’s novel (and Visconti’s film) The Leopard – the place has a wistful nobility; lingering here is like entering the pages of the book, where “Everything must change, so everything can stay the same.”

To transform his ancestral home into a boutique residence, Petrucci collaborated with Gabriele Salini, founder of the GS Collection of hotels. Their aim? To create a sense of “contemporary nostalgia” in which avant-garde art and installations inhabit the cool, echoing, 19th-century salons. Here, art is not merely for art’s sake, it is also functional: photographic lightboxes by Simon d’Exéa illuminate the rooms; Pietro Ruffo’s site-specific works on curling wallpaper fill the salons’ grandiose silence; you can even shower in a baptismal “living art” installation.

Palazzo Daniele
Palazzo Daniele

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The conversion, by Milan stylists Ludovica and Roberto Palomba, celebrates “the sanctity of absence”. With minimalist designer furnishings, the building narrates its own story through family crests on mosaic floors, neoclassical frescoes and art nouveau murals. A lace-draped altar in the red-damasked chapel is now an honesty bar, the neon-lit Holy Spirits. Bedrooms are baronial in scale, monastic in their simplicity: distressed walls in chalky or putty colours bear the scars of time; open steel-framed wardrobes, no TVs or minibars. Everything enhances the sense of space and GS Collection’s guiding principle: Questa casa non è un albergo (“This house is not a hotel”).

Social distancing is easy in the ample and airy salons, and in its walled gardens, fragrant with jasmine and citrus blossom, where you can muse in the bijou Kaffeehaus folly or take a dip in the pool. “Our exclusiveness and attention to detail are the key elements for the safety of our guests during these uncertain times,” says Salini.
Keen to make the palazzo “a gateway to the community”, staff can arrange experiences that immerse you in Puglia’s traditions: catch sea urchins with a local fisherman, cook Salentino specialities with earth-mother chef Donata Rizzo, or visit the annual Capo d’Arte contemporary art exhibition curated in venues around town.

A couple of hours’ drive along the rocky east coast will take you to Ostuni, the ancient “White City” founded by the Greeks, set in Biblical olive groves and edged by the Adriatic Sea. Here, the newly opened Paragon 700 Boutique Hotel & Spa occupies a stately classical palazzo. Painted in Pompeian red, it lords it over the lime-washed medieval citadel.

Paragon 700 Boutique Hotel & Spa
Paragon 700 Boutique Hotel & Spa

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When the current owners, Pascale Lauber and Ulrike Bauschke, bought the place in 2016, Ostuni’s Palazzo Rosso had been abandoned for more than 40 years. They found a shell of cracked walls and crumbling plaster, rotten wood and rusty iron. “But the building was simply too beautiful to stay hidden!” they recall. In the long renovation process, local artisans uncovered the original frescoes and restored period features using traditional methods. A spa was hewn from an underground water cistern, and the tangled overgrowth outside transformed into urban lawned gardens complete with a swimming pool and a shady colonnade for al fresco dining.

Lauber’s theatrical flair pervades the interiors, and the 11 individually curated suites are like Baroque opera sets. Frescoed grotesques, swirling arabesques and Biblical narratives are the backdrop for Puglian carved-wood armoires, desks and commodes. The scenographic rooms are named after their jewel-like colours: Amber, Amethyst, Opal, Topaz and Lapis Lazuli. Lauber’s favourite is Onyx, done in dramatic shades of black.

The place is animated with personal mementos from Lauber and Bauschke’s itinerant lives: spice-coloured sofas and bedheads from South Africa, lotus-flower lamps from Thailand, antique Argentinian tin-plates, and bric-a-brac from English flea markets. There are some delightfully whimsical touches, too: waistcoated wooden monkeys cavort on the bar; statues of the Seven Dwarfs (Lauber’s take on the garden gnome) pose outside: “We left Snow White behind; she was far too ugly!” laughs Bauschke.

Paragon 700 Hotel & Spa
Paragon 700 Hotel & Spa

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Quirky contemporary art by Suzanne Lipsey and Giuseppe Ciraci deck the walls, and there’s not a TV screen in sight. For Lauber, the hotel is more than just a physical space: “It’s all about movement, and the way people interact with the place,” she gestures. To that end, the kitchen and dining areas are casually choreographed, with head chef Giovanni Cerroni and his team serving and introducing the food – the quality of which should surely earn Cerroni a Michelin star or two. “I see the hotel as a total concept, not just one of aesthetic beauty,” Lauber reflects. “Everything has to work together.” And so, in this beguilingly eclectic city, it does.

The details

Palazzo Daniele, Corso Umberto I, 60, Gagliano del Capo (00 39 08 335 33185; palazzodaniele.com). Double rooms from €350 (£319) in low season and from €650 in high. Nearest airport: Brindisi (72 miles).

Paragon 700 Boutique Hotel & Spa, Largo Michele Ayroldi Carissimo, 14, Ostuni (00 39 0831 369219; paragon700.com). Double rooms from €250 in low season and from €500 in high. (Minimum age: 14). Nearest airport: Brindisi (24 miles).

In light of Covid-19, both hotels apply stringent practices around food handling, sanitisation, disinfection and cleaning to protect guests and staff.

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More palazzo hotels to book in Puglia

Palazzo Bozzi Corso, Lecce

The operatic Baroque city of Lecce makes the perfect entr’acte between Gagliano del Capo and Ostuni. In the heart of the old town, the 18th-century Palazzo Bozzi Corso offers palatial suites and an exotic walled courtyard shaded by palms and romantically lit by a 1001 lights. Gracing the lofty interiors are 20th-century paintings and sculptures that tell the fascinating story of the owners, Antonia and Giacomo Filali, and their artistic ancestors. Several times a week, in-house cook Maria Carla Pennetta offers gourmet evenings when you can dine on Apulian fare.

Doubles from €495 (£450). Via Umberto I, 38, 73100 Lecce (00 39 0832 1560335; palazzobozzicorso.com

Palazzo Bozzi Corso
Palazzo Bozzi Corso

Palazzi Maritati and Muci, Nardò

French chef Guy Martin’s sense of taste finds expression not only in his Michelin-starred Parisian restaurant, Le Grand Véfour, but also in his restoration of two 18th-century palaces in Nardò, Puglia. Martin and his wife, Katherina Marx, have created an ode to idleness in their guesthouse, forging 10 breezy rooms and suites from Palazzo Maritati – a symphony of dazzling whites – and Palazzo Muci, whose curved arches hint at Nardò’s Byzantine past.

Double rooms from €125 (£114). Palazzo Muci, Via Cialdini, 38, Nardò and Palazzo Maritati, Via Giovan Bernardino Tafuri, 7, Nardò (00 39 327 766 4632; maritatiemuci.com)  

Palazzo Muci
Palazzo Muci