Masseria San Domenico wedding

The masseria began as a watchtower of the Knights of Malta and spent most of its life as a farm. It is now a five-star hotel of 40 rooms in 150 acres of olive groves, on the coast road between Savelletri and Torre Canne, with the Adriatic five hundred metres away through the trees.

The pool is what people picture when they hear the name. Rather than a rectangle of chlorine it is a free-form lagoon cut into the rock, planted around the edges and filled with seawater that the hotel filters naturally, which is the same idea as the thalassotherapy spa indoors.

Two private beach clubs, a golf course, two tennis courts and a seafood restaurant on the water at San Domenico a Mare fill the days either side.

The estate is large and the wedding spaces are outdoor ones, which is the single most important thing to understand about it.

Where dinner usually happens, with the lagoon on one side and the masseria lit behind. It takes the largest parties the property can hold and it is what everybody comes for.

150 acres of them, and the ceremony is held among the trees. There is space here for a marquee of almost any size, which is what makes 300 guests possible at all.

Vaulted and white, and the only indoor space that seats a dinner. It takes 80, and above that number it cannot be made to work at all: the room stops being an option rather than becoming a tight one.

The seafront annexe, with four rooms at the water and the La Nassa seafood restaurant, open June to September. It takes a welcome dinner or a beach day, with the beach held for your party from eleven until six.

A Masseria San Domenico wedding starts from €300,000 and lands near €500,000 all-in for 100 to 200 guests.

The rooms are the largest part of it. A wedding is a buyout of all 40, for a minimum of three nights, from three in the afternoon on the arrival day to midday on the last, and the masseria quotes those nights per set of dates rather than from a published list. Two events have to take place during the stay or a minimum spend is applied instead.

All the catering, and no outside caterer is permitted. In exchange it asks nothing about the other suppliers, which is rare and genuinely useful: the florist, the designer, the band and the photographer are all yours to choose. A set-up and location fee applies to each event, and one menu tasting for four people comes free.

The wine and spirits, which are quoted apart from the food; the marquee, which is a hire of its own; the flowers and the design; the music and the Italian music licence; the transfers between the masseria, the beach and the airports; and the city tax. The masseria does not plan weddings, so the whole of that work sits outside as well.

40 rooms and suites in the main house, sleeping 95 with extra beds, from Classic Rooms up through the Junior Suites that look onto the garden or the terraces to the Suite San Domenico and Il Villino, a villa with a pool of its own.

San Domenico a Mare adds four rooms at the sea, taken as a run of the house rather than chosen individually. They are the quietest beds on the estate and the ones with water outside the window.

Breakfast is laid every morning for the whole party, and the spa, the pool, the golf course and both beach clubs stay open throughout. No pets are allowed anywhere on the property.

The masseria sits on the Strada Provinciale 90, in the run of great estates between Savelletri and Torre Canne, with Torre Maizza and Torre Coccaro a few minutes up the road.

Ostuni is 28 minutes, Alberobello 31, Polignano a Mare 23 and Monopoli 18. Guests who want a day out have the whole of the Valle d’Itria within half an hour, and guests who do not have 150 acres, two beaches and a golf course without leaving.

Brindisi is 47 minutes and Bari just over the hour, and having two airports inside an hour widens the flights a guest list can be built around. The masseria’s own material says 60 kilometres to each, which is about right for Bari and generous for Brindisi; the routed distance to Brindisi is 55.

The marquee decision is the one that catches people out, and it has to be made early. There is no wet-weather room on this estate above 80 guests, and nothing can be built outside the days you have bought, so a marquee is either booked months ahead and paid for whether it rains or not, or the wedding is capped at 80 and held in the dining room. We always price the marquee in from the first budget rather than treating it as insurance, because at this venue it is structure.

The second thing is what the buyout is really buying.

Forty rooms sleeping 95 means a good part of a 150-guest list is already housed, and the rest fill the masserie and hotels nearby. Three nights turns that into a weekend: a beach day at San Domenico a Mare, a welcome dinner on the water, the wedding in the olives, and nobody driving anywhere in between.

The third is the supplier freedom. Being tied to the kitchen and free everywhere else is the opposite of the usual arrangement in Puglia, and it means the design of the day is genuinely ours to shape rather than chosen from a list.

Magic Day plans weddings at Masseria San Domenico from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the buyout and the three nights it runs to, the two events the agreement requires, the marquee and when it has to be committed, the symbolic ceremony and the celebrant, the menus with the masseria’s own kitchen, the florist and designer that the property leaves open, and the transfers from Brindisi and Bari.

We have worked across Puglia since the Bari office opened in 2014, and this coast is where most of it happens. Tell us the dates and roughly how many people, and we will tell you what the masseria costs on those nights and what the marquee adds.