A bougainvillea-festooned, 16th-century, fortified farmhouse, surrounded by ancient olive trees, provides the bones for Masseria Torre Maizza, in Puglia. It’s a rambling, whitewashed place, situated between the town of Fasano and the Adriatic Sea. While it’s close to various Puglian delights—the trulli of Alberobello, mozzarella-making dairy farms—as well as a nine-hole golf course that snakes around the hotel, it also offers seclusion for those wanting to hunker down and unwind.
And many do. The hotel consistently ranks as a favorite for couples, and once I get to my suite with its private plunge pool, it’s immediately clear why. The history of the hotel might hook you—its watchtower was once used as a lookout against Ottoman and Saracen attackers—but it’s the rooms, created by Rocco Forte’s design director, Olga Polizzi, that reel you in. My room—a villa, really—features the hotel-wide color scheme of white, terra-cotta, and green, with distinctive majolica plates adorning the wall and ceramic lamps from the nearby town of Grottaglie. A family of four could live quite comfortably in the sizable bathroom.
The grounds of the hotel are filled with myrtle, jasmine, and wisteria and include a botanical garden where basil, oregano, and chili peppers are grown for the locally sourced restaurant Carosello. Here you can have tuna tartare sprinkled with puntarella—a local bitter green—while for the main, there’s a pillowy orechiette dish with broccoli cream, chicory, and pecorino. Indulge in too much of the Puglian wine and the comforting mascarpone fluff of a tiramisu may help settle your giddiness.
In the morning you can shake off the excesses of the previous night in the hotel’s crystal-blue pool, surrounded by columns. But at Masseria, food perpetually creeps back to steal the show. The pizza at the poolside Violetta restaurant is as fresh and vibrant as anything this side of the Dolomites.
In the evening, guests are invited to take part in a cooking class (for $178 per person), and we get to prepare the night’s mise en place alongside Fulvio Pierangelini, Rocco Forte’s creative director of food. (If he’s not at the hotel during your visit, another chef will be deputized.) With his thick gray hair and substantial frame, Pierangelini is an imposing, charismatic presence. He’s a legend in the Italian dining scene, with multiple Michelin stars, but he hates the limelight. He walks my party through the steps of making a shrimp, orange, and green-bean salad, before our attention turns to his much-vaunted, and painstakingly prepared, spaghetti pomodoro.
At his old restaurant, Gambero Rosso, Pierangelini charged the same amount for this traditionally simple dish as he did for his lobster pasta. He wanted to draw attention to the work and time involved in making his pomodoro sauce, specifically the way the tomatoes are eased apart by hand rather than with a knife. He is obsessed with making the humblest ingredient the “diva of the dish.” The results are sublime. “Don’t forget, food is a social act first,” he says as he makes his way from our table into the night.
You may need a trip to the spa to recover, and there’s an array of Irene Forte—the daughter of Rocco Forte—skin products to choose from. Of the many ointments and unctions used for my facial, I recall the almond cleansing mill, helichrysum toner, and olive eye cream, all of which are available for purchase. It’s a calming zone, the perfect place to give yourself up to the furtive clutches of sleep. “Piano, piano,” I think, remembering the hotel’s slow-living motto, before I escape into the ether.
The writer was a guest of Masseria Torre Maizza, where room rates begin at $742 per night
Nick Thompson is a London-based writer
