Masseria San Domenico

Ask to see the cave beside the terrace — the estate's old olive-oil store, stone press still standing where the workers left it, with the smaller caves beyond that once hid monks. Then book the spa's late slot: the communal thalasso areas admit treatment guests only, and under the retractable roof at dusk the saltwater pool is effectively private.

The drive in sets the pace — a long tree-lined approach through the olives, the white tower rising ahead — and the masseria keeps its promise of quiet even at full house: forty rooms dissolve into gardens, arched passageways and open piazzas, and the loudest thing most afternoons is the fountain. Rooms run classic — four-posters, jewel-toned fabrics, baskets of the estate's fruit — and the best of them open onto private gardens or face the sea across the silver olive canopy.

The water organises the day. The free-form seawater pool curls through rocks and planting with a jacuzzi tucked into its course; the thalasso centre below works heated Adriatic water through its pools and treatment labyrinth, salt, seaweed and mineral mud in sequences the therapists pace so one treatment hands you to the next; and when the sea itself calls, La Fonte's sand and the cove at San Domenico a Mare are minutes away, the latter with La Nassa serving fish above the rocks. Golfers cross to the championship course on the shore; the energetic find tennis, the gym, bikes and dive courses; everyone else finds a lounger.

Evenings begin with aperitivi on the terrace — the house olives, local vermouth, the sun dropping behind the groves — and dinner moves between the 18th-century dining room and the summer terraces, Puglian classics beside more daring plates, the produce largely the estate's own. The crowd is adult by policy and unhurried by temperament, and that is the masseria's deepest luxury: a working olive estate that happens to heal you, run by the family who taught Puglia how it is done.