A warm welcome

FROM RUIN TO RETREAT

By David Plaisant

When Gustavo Antonioni first arrived at the abandoned estate that would eventually become Masseria Partemio, he didn’t expect to have an emotional connection to the property. But, standing beneath a tree outside the house, he suddenly found himself overwhelmed. “I started to cry and said to myself,” he recalls, “‘I’m going to buy this house. I’m going to change my life.’” Within months he had left his corporate career – two decades in London’s entertainment industry – behind and begun the improbable task of restoring the 17th-century home.

Built in 1608 as the country estate of a Neapolitan nobleman, Masseria Partemio began life as a villa set amid agricultural land. Despite recognizing its dilapidated state, Antonioni sensed the potential in this masseria, the name for the fortified farmhouses scattered across Puglia.

Over the centuries, the estate passed through several distinct lives. In the mid-18th century, it entered the holdings of Benedictine nuns from nearby Oria, who transformed the property into a dairy farm. After generations of agricultural use, the last farming family left in 1977, and the estate fell silent, slowly surrendering to the landscape. Yet the building’s bones remained remarkably clear. Antonioni assembled a small team and began stabilizing the structure: reinforcing foundations, rebuilding vaults, and stripping away decades of plaster that concealed the building’s original ceilings.

The house itself provided the starting point. Its exterior, painted a distinctive Pompeian red with ochre accents, became the anchor for the entire palette. The color was applied using traditional techniques, with natural pigments mixed directly into the plaster so that the tones are absorbed into the porous local tufo stone. And when stepping inside the masseria, color arrives immediately. In the entrance hall, the vaulted ceiling unfolds in shades of green, yellow, ochre, purple, and blue – fragments of decoration that resurfaced when layers of whitewash were stripped away during the restoration. Rather than erase these traces, Antonioni used them as a guide. “The color was dictated by what was revealed,” he explains.

Antonioni approached the interiors less as a conventional hospitality project than as a personal act of curation, layering objects, furniture, and artworks collected over decades of travel and lived experience.

The resulting atmosphere is eclectic but deliberate. Contemporary Italian design pieces sit alongside antiques discovered in local markets, while salvaged architectural elements are repurposed in unexpected ways. “Everything here is recycled in some way or other,” he says. In one bathroom, for example, a pair of 17th-century confessional doors from a nearby church now frame the entrance. Antonioni cheekily describes it as a place to “flush your sins away.”

Today, the rhythm of life at Masseria Partemio revolves less around architecture than around the rituals of hospitality. Guests drift between shaded terraces, the garden, and the kitchen where Antonioni often cooks, preparing simple dishes shaped by the seasonal produce that arrives daily from nearby farms and markets. Tomatoes, basil, and freshly made pasta appear regularly on the menu, along with cheeses from local dairies and fruit picked from the surrounding countryside of Puglia. Antonioni is particularly proud of his homemade limoncello, made from the pear-shaped citrus they pick from trees in the courtyard.

Evenings tend to unfold slowly. As the sun lowers across the olive groves, guests gather on the rooftop terrace beside the masseria’s Moorish tower for aperitivo. From here, the view stretches towards Oria, its hilltop castle visible in the distance as the landscape fades into dusk. Dinner itself often takes place outside in the courtyard around one of the house’s most distinctive features: a long red table that stretches across the terrace and seats up to 25 guests.

Around it, strangers become companions, bottles of local wine circulate freely, and conversation stretches late into the warm nights. This summer ritual captures the spirit of the house: a place where history has been preserved and new stories constantly begin. Somewhere beyond the terrace, bounding across the olive groves and gardens, Antonioni’s two Weimaraners, Ludo and Ellie, roam freely, where “they’re in paradise.” The dogs aren’t the only ones.