Masseria Torre Coccaro: The Muolo Family's Original, Where the Spa Is in the Caves
One of the masserie that taught Puglia how to do luxury; a 16th-century watchtower farm above the Adriatic, run by the Muolo family, with an Aveda spa carved into caves a thousand years old and two beach clubs of its own.
Torre Coccaro is one of the masserie that taught Puglia how to do luxury, run by one of the families who wrote the playbook — the Muolos, whose Vittorio Muolo also owns Torre Maizza, the Rocco Forte masseria up the road. So no, it isn't a discovery. What it is, is the genuine article: a 16th-century fortified farm that has stayed in careful family hands long enough to feel lived-in rather than staged.
The whitewashed watchtower went up in the sixteenth century, part of the coastal line built to watch for Saracen raiders; the little chapel dates to 1730 and still holds mass; and below ground are caves that have held an olive mill and sheep stables since around the year 1000. The Aveda spa is down in those caves now — an indoor pool, a Turkish bath, treatments made with the estate's own products — which is the kind of thing you can't build, only inherit.
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The thirty-nine rooms and suites run from cave rooms to villas with private pools, dressed in Trani stone and hand-embroidered fabrics, understated rather than glossy. The farm is organic and the olive groves are some eight hundred years old, and the kitchen cooks from both — the dry-farmed vegetables, the estate oil, the local fish — across the masseria's dining rooms and down at the water. Because this is the Savelletri coast, there are two beach clubs of the masseria's own, a short hop from the gates.
It sits between Fasano and the sea, the airports at Bari and Brindisi each about forty minutes off, with Ostuni and the trulli of Alberobello an easy drive inland. Come for the caves and the family who kept them; book a cave room, and let the old mill and the spa do the rest.
PROPERTY DNA
Ownership | Independent; a private home that takes a few guests, created by Lord Alistair McAlpine and his wife Athena, who runs it still |
Era & Design | A former Franciscan monastery, roughly 500 years old (14th–15th century); restored by the McAlpines from the early 2000s |
Setting | An unmarked door in a stone wall on the edge of Marittima di Diso, ~2 km from the Adriatic, near the bottom of the Salento |
Rooms | 8 bedrooms — the monks' original cells; sleeps ~15, and can be taken whole |
Designs & Makers | The McAlpines' lived-in collection of folk and tribal art from four continents; in the kitchen, the chef Pierluigi and his mother Cecilia |