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€0.00/ Night
24/7 Support
Looking for help choosing or for a property we don't list? Message our Private Rates Concierge on WhatsApp for member rates and insider knowledge on the right stay
One of Nardò's oldest mansions, now a five-room hideaway by a couple who met at the Ritz Paris — frescoes, three courtyards, and a pool under an orange tree in Baroque Salento.
Collections:
Need To Know
- 5 rooms, each around 30 m² with king bed and walk-in rain shower; the two Grand rooms take extra beds at no charge, and the whole house sleeps 10 across five en-suite bedrooms
- Families genuinely welcome — extra beds, babysitting on request, board games in the lounge
- Our Favourite Rooms: the Cappella Grand Room for the fresco; Gallipoli for its little terrace and the morning cappuccino
- No restaurant by design: breakfast comes with fresh pastries and local fruit, a Puglian cook does market lunches and pasticciotto lessons, and chefs can be booked for dinners at home
- Experiences arranged: cooking classes, bike tours, yoga, in-room massages
- Free parking at nearby Piazza Cesare Battisti; the lanes themselves are pedestrian
- Olive-oil soaps scented with flowers that grow around Nardò; robes and organic amenities in every room
Check in - Check out
Check in from 14:00; check out before 12:00.
We Love
- The courtyard at the heart of it — once the communal space of a Salento family, now a stone-walled pool with an orange tree, where morning dips slide into long lunches.
- The Cappella Grand Room — a restored ceiling fresco, ancient stone sculptures discovered during the works and kept exactly where they were found, antique pavements underfoot.
- The in-house Puglian cook — market lunches at the long table, pasticciotto lessons in the kitchen, and local chefs taking over the stove for dinner when you would rather host than book.
- Anne and Sylvain's eye — the French couple met at the Ritz Paris, spent over two years on the restoration with Nardò's own artisans, and it shows in every cement tile and sunburst mirror.
- The Salento position — Santa Maria al Bagno and Santa Caterina ten minutes away, Porto Selvaggio's wild coast for snorkelling, Lecce's Baroque about twenty minutes up the road.
Key Features
Book Your Stay at Casa a Corte
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Location
Address
Via Tafurelle, 12, 73048 Nardò (LE), Puglia, Italy
Travel Info
Brindisi airport is about 50 minutes, Bari around two hours; transfers arranged. Nardò Città station, a kilometre away, runs direct trains to Lecce and Gallipoli; Lecce is roughly 20 minutes by car and the Ionian beaches ten. Free parking nearby.
Last Updated: 2026-06-06
Expert Review
Origins
Casa a corte is Salento's oldest housing idea — rooms gathered around a shared courtyard where families cooked, worked and talked — and this particular casa is one of the oldest mansions in Nardò, raised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries behind walls of Lecce stone eighteen feet high. The fabric survived intact: swirling cement-tile floors, arches and vaults, carved corbels, columns and limestone friezes, and a string of three courtyards running through the heart of the house.
The revival is a love story with professional standards. Anne Benichou and Sylvain Greiner, French and formed by careers in grand hotels — they met at the Ritz Paris — chose Nardò for the first house of their small AS Luxury Places collection, then spent more than two years on the restoration with local artists and artisans, recovering every fragment the building offered. Ceiling frescoes were brought back; ancient stone sculptures, discovered during the works, were kept precisely where they were found, and the Cappella Grand Room wears the best of both. The design press came in numbers — Architectural Digest among them — for the way the Baroque was tamed rather than gilded: antiques and mid-century pieces, velvet and patterned textiles, a sunburst mirror against bare stone.
The hospitality runs on privacy. There is no restaurant and no front desk theatre — instead a serious kitchen, a Puglian cook for market lunches and pasticciotto lessons, chefs on call for dinner, and soaps pressed from olive oil and scented with the flowers that grow around the town. Nardò itself — named, they say, from an ancient word for water, on the spot where a bull struck a spring from the rock — keeps its Baroque piazzas pleasingly to itself, twenty minutes from Lecce and ten from the Ionian sea.
Top Secret
Take the cook's pasticciotto lesson early in the stay — the custard-filled pastries are Salento's breakfast religion, and once you can make them the town's bakeries become a comparative study. Then claim the Gallipoli room's little terrace at night: the Pugliese sky over Nardò's rooftops is the house's quietest luxury.
The Review
The door on Via Tafurelle gives nothing away, which is the point: Nardò's grandest houses have always kept their beauty inside. Step through and the house opens as a sequence — courtyard, arches, courtyard again — until you reach the pool under the orange tree, stone walls high enough that the town disappears and only its bells get in. The five rooms run on vaulted ceilings and cool stone, each around thirty square metres, antiques against contemporary comforts, frescoes overhead in the Cappella and a private terrace on Gallipoli.
The house assumes you will live in it rather than pass through. Mornings start with pastries and fruit in the courtyard; the kitchen fills with market finds and, on the good days, with the cook rolling pasticciotto dough while you watch with a coffee; afternoons belong to the pool or the beaches — Santa Maria al Bagno and Santa Caterina are ten minutes, Porto Selvaggio's pine-backed coves a few more. Evenings split between chef dinners at the long table and the short walk to Piazza Salandra for wine and seafood under the Baroque.
What stays with you is the calibration. Two careers in grand hotels taught the owners exactly which rituals matter — the turndown-quality linens, the robes, the pressure in the rain showers — and which theatre to leave out. The result feels less like a hotel than like inheriting a Salento aunt's palazzo, staffed by people who trained at the best address in Paris. Trips to the town's best bakery become ritual; time slows to courtyard pace; and the whole of Baroque Salento — Lecce, Galatina, Gallipoli — waits within half an hour for whenever the pool releases you.
