Podere40 Country Hotel

After the Second World War, Italy broke its great estates into poderi, small farms meant to give peasant families land of their own. In the 1950s and 1960s many of the families who were given one could not make it pay, and emigrated. Podere 40, a masseria at Pittuini two kilometres inland from Porto Cesareo, is one of the farms they left behind. It has been restored in worn, whitewashed wood and the colours of clay, low and white behind dry-stone walls with prickly pears along the top, in country so flat that the horizon is the only thing in the way.

We would not have picked Podere40 for the building. It is here for the family who run it, whose kindness was out of the ordinary and made the hotel. It showed most at breakfast: home baking in a quantity a hotel of six rooms has no business producing, and every piece of it made by hand.

Ours was a large, comfortable room. Families should ask for Camera 6, built for two couples or a family of four, with a veranda facing west over the garden and the pool. There is a playground, and babysitting to be had.

The pool lies between a lawn and a row of stone cabanas, with a wooden deck of sunbeds along one side and water spouting in from a low stone wall, and at dusk it is lit a hard turquoise. We never swam in it.

Early October was against us, and it kept us off the beaches as well. Porto Cesareo's, at Torre Lapillo and Punta Prosciutto, are two kilometres away by car, which is as close as we got. So we went to the towns instead, and from here there is no shortage of them, with Lecce's baroque old town half an hour's drive. In better weather the hotel has bikes, and runs catamaran trips along the coast for an aperitivo or for dinner on the water.

Dinner on land is at Trasi, the hotel's restaurant, which cooks the Salento's own dishes: orecchiette with turnip tops, and ciciri e tria, chickpeas and pasta with some of the pasta fried crisp and laid on top. Trasi is Salento dialect for come in, and the family who run Podere40 mean it.