Puglia for Incentive Groups: The Masseria, the Olive Oil and the Table That Never Ends
Puglia is the fastest-growing incentive destination in Italy and, for now, the most underused relative to its assets. The reasons for its growth are straightforward: it offers the combination of natural landscape quality, architectural heritage, gastronomic depth, and accommodation specificity (the working masseria) that the more established Italian incentive destinations (Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast) have been producing for thirty years, at a substantially lower cost and with substantially lower booking pressure. The reasons for its continued underuse are equally straightforward: it is a long way from the north European airports that most incentive groups travel from, and it is not yet on the shortlist that most incentive buyers carry without research. This will change. The correct time to use Puglia is now, before it is on that shortlist.
Puglia for Incentive Groups - The Masseria as Incentive Base
The working masseria — the fortified agricultural estate that is Puglia's most distinctive architectural form — is the correct format for the Puglia incentive programme, for the same reasons that the Scottish estate and the English country house are the correct formats in their respective contexts: the property's exclusive use, the domestic staff programme, the estate's agricultural production feeding the kitchen. The difference in Puglia for incentive groups is the specific character of the agricultural production: the olive grove (with trees of documented millennial age in the best properties), the artichoke and broad bean cultivation in spring, the olive harvest in October and November that produces the DOP oil that defines the Pugliese table. A corporate group that spends three or four days on a working masseria during October olive harvest has access to a programme element — the harvest morning, the frantoio pressing, the new oil tasted on bread at the mill — that is specific to this landscape and this moment in the agricultural year.
Lecce and the Baroque
Lecce is the most underestimated city in southern Italy and the most architecturally surprising for groups encountering it for the first time. The Lecce Baroque — the style developed by the city's craftsmen between the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries using the workable local pietra leccese limestone — is more exuberant, more densely ornamented, and more specifically theatrical than any other regional Baroque tradition in Italy, including the Val di Noto. The Basilica di Santa Croce (whose facade constitutes the most comprehensive single facade of the style), the Piazza del Duomo (the enclosed cathedral square that reads as a stage set rather than a public space), and the streets of the historic centre (lined with palace facades of consistent ornamental richness) produce an evening programme element of genuine architectural authority. The walk from the masseria to Lecce takes forty minutes by car; the evening in the Piazza del Duomo with a private dinner at one of the cortile restaurants is the programme's most atmospheric event.
The Salento Coast
The Salento peninsula — the southern tip of Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot — has two coastlines of different character: the Adriatic coast to the east, with lower-energy sea and the calcareous rock formations of Polignano a Mare and the Grotte di Castellana; and the Ionian coast to the west, with deeper turquoise water and the specific light quality of the Gulf of Taranto. A private boat day from the Porto di Santa Maria di Leuca at the peninsula's tip, exploring the sea caves of the Grotta Zinzulusa and the calcareous stacks of the southeastern coast, is the Salento's marine argument for a corporate group that has spent three days in the interior masseria context.
