Borgo Canonica

When the master trullo builders came to Borgo Canonica, ivy had climbed the cones and green had covered everything else. The village outside Cisternino dates from the middle of the 1800s, when, the hotel suggests, it may have sheltered Basilian monks; peasant families followed, and then sixty years of nobody. The architects Aldo Flore and Rosanna Venezia restored it in stone and lime, keeping the old ovens and cisterns along with 42 cones of grey stone capped in white, on six hectares of old olive trees. Inside a cone the stone climbs in rings to a dark eye at the top; below, the walls are limewashed and the doorways arched in rough stone. The Deluxe Lamia does without a cone: its ceiling is a single arch, like the roof of a cave, and the name comes from that.

Recommended for couples, and for families with young children, who have come to Puglia for the trulli and do not mind driving to the sea. Ostuni is eighteen minutes away by car and Alberobello twenty; in summer a shuttle runs to the beach in the Torre Guaceto reserve, and the hotel arranges boat trips into the sea caves at Polignano a Mare. There is no kids club and no babysitting, so the children have the pool and a menu of their own. Breakfast is what guests praise, for its homemade bread and the olive groves around it, and the pool bar has warm croissants and tarts. Dinner is one of the restaurant's four-course Puglian menus. The borgo opens from the end of May to early November, and paths run through the wood above it to green spaces set aside for reading, for an afternoon when nobody wants the car.