Palazzo Daniele

The house was built in 1861 and never quite stopped being a home. What Palomba Serafini did, restoring it a few years ago, was mostly to take things away. Grand frescoed ceilings and worn majolica floors carry the rooms; the walls between them are bare lime plaster, the beds plain, the art placed with a gallery's confidence. A cast bronze head sits over one bed. A backlit picture glows in a bathroom the colour of ash. Downstairs the arched loggia runs on into a second courtyard and a third, palms and orange trees breaking the shade, and a pool waits in the walled garden at the end of it. The effect is grand and spare at once, which is harder to hold than either on its own.

The table

There is no restaurant in the usual sense, and no menu. A single open kitchen cooks what the day and the Salento provide, orecchiette and bitter greens, fish from the two coasts that meet down the road, and the tables are laid where the hour suits, under the frescoes, in the courtyard, beside the pool. You eat what you are given. In a region this proud of its own cooking, that turns out to be the right way round.

Why it's in VANE

Puglia has filled up with masserie selling the same tan and the same olive groves. Palazzo Daniele does something rarer. It stays in the town, keeps the bones of an aristocratic house and lets contemporary art and empty space do the talking. Gagliano del Capo is almost the last town before Santa Maria di Leuca, where the Adriatic and the Ionian meet, so you are as far south as the heel goes, with Lecce and its baroque an hour north. Nine rooms, one kitchen, and none of the usual front-of-house theatre. The neon in the courtyard is only half joking.