Masseria Trapanà: One Man's Two-Year Restoration of a 16th-Century Masseria Near Lecce
The Australian hotelier Rob Potter-Sanders spent two years bringing a late-16th-century masseria back from a century of neglect; ten rooms, cast-iron beds forged by the local blacksmith, a frescoed Renaissance chapel, and a spa carved from the old olive mill
Some masserie are restored; Masseria Trapanà was rescued. When the Australian hotelier Rob Potter-Sanders first saw it, in 2013, the late-sixteenth-century farm had sat untouched for a hundred years. He bought it — closing the deal remotely, from Sydney — and spent the next two years putting it back together by hand.
What he made is one of the quietly loveliest places to stay in the Salento. The bones are honeyed limestone and cathedral-high cross-vaults; the oldest room is the Chapel of Santa Barbara, which still holds its Renaissance frescoes. The four-poster beds were forged in cast iron by a local blacksmith and topped with mattresses two meters wide; lobster baskets have become lampshades and old doors tabletops, and Moroccan kilims warm the stone floors. There are ten rooms in all, most with both an indoor and an outdoor bathroom — an al-fresco shower, a tub on a private walled terrace.
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Around the house lie six walled gardens planted with nineteen kinds of fruit and nut, a pool garden, hammocks slung between the trees. Below ground, the old frantoio — the olive mill — has become a subterranean spa, with a warm magnesium pool, a massage room, and a small room for tasting the local wine. The estate runs to some sixty hectares of olive grove, and the kitchen cooks four courses that change every day with whatever's been picked from the gardens.
Trapanà is in Surbo, twenty minutes from Lecce and ten from the Adriatic, with Brindisi's airport about twenty-five miles north; the minimum age is twelve, which tells you the kind of quiet it keeps. Come for a few unhurried days, book the room in the old chapel, and let Rob tell you what he found under the hundred years of dust.
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 |