Masseria Santo Scalone wedding

Santo Scalone sits in olive country outside Ostuni, six minutes from the white town on its hill. The masseria is whitewashed and low, with a chapel built onto one end of it, and the gardens around it are laid out plainly: lawns, dry-stone walls, a long pool edged with agapanthus, and terracotta parasols that are the only strong colour anywhere.

Inside there is a vaulted dining room with pendant lights and rush-seated chairs, and a smaller room papered in a faded damask. The whole place has been done with a light hand, and from the air it reads as a working estate rather than a hotel.

The masseria publishes no plan of its spaces, so what follows is what the photographs, the email and our own knowledge of the estate establish between them. It works at a hundred guests and not beyond.

Where the ceremony and the dinner go, on grass between the masseria and the olive groves, with the chapel at one end of the building.

A long pool with stone surrounds, agapanthus along the edge and terracotta parasols, used for the aperitif on the arrival day and for the pizza party on the last.

Two of them, vaulted and white, which between them are the wet-weather answer and the setting for a smaller dinner. The larger has the pendant lights and the arched opening that appears in most of the photographs.

Built into the fabric of the masseria. The estate offers a symbolic ceremony rather than a civil one, so the chapel is a setting rather than a registry.

A Masseria Santo Scalone wedding starts from €150,000 and lands near €250,000 all-in.

€34,000 with tax for three nights in June or September, which takes the whole estate, all the rooms and an abundant sweet and savoury breakfast every morning. The masseria charges the same for a weekend as for midweek, which nothing else in this set does and which is worth a good deal when a Saturday elsewhere carries a premium. City tax is added per person per night.

They are not extras. The masseria requires an Apulian aperitif on the first day, the reception dinner on the second and a pizza party on the third, and it prices each on a minimum of 60 people.

The aperitif and the pizza party are €80 a head each, with two drinks included in each. The wedding dinner starts at €200 a head. The kitchen does all of it except the pizza, which comes from an outside supplier, and the menus run to live stations: a panzerotto corner, a bakery corner, mozzarella and burrata made fresh, an open grill of bombette and sausages or grilled octopus.

The chairs for the ceremony, which are hired to whatever the couple chooses; the flowers and the design; the music and the Italian licence; the photography; the city tax; and the transfers.

Sixty beds in all. Nineteen rooms in the masseria account for 48 of them, and two dependances add six double rooms, and every one is part of the buyout, so nobody else is on the estate for the three nights.

The rooms are white and vaulted, from classic doubles to a master suite, with a sitting room shared between them. Breakfast is laid every morning for the whole party and is described by the masseria as abundant, which the menus bear out.

Sixty is a good number for this kind of wedding: a guest list of a hundred sleeps most of its family and closest friends on site, and the rest go to Ostuni six minutes away.

The masseria is in the olive groves outside Ostuni, on the Brindisi side of the white town.

Ostuni is 6 minutes and is where the guest overflow stays and where most people spend an afternoon. Savelletri and the coast are 36 minutes, Alberobello 36 and Polignano a Mare 49, so this is the Ostuni side of Puglia rather than the coast-road side.

Brindisi airport is 44 minutes, among the shortest runs in this set, and Bari is an hour and a half.

The flat rate is the thing to notice first. Every other venue in Puglia charges more for a Saturday, and several charge a great deal more; Santo Scalone charges the same whichever three nights you take. For a couple whose guests can travel midweek that changes nothing, and for a couple whose guests cannot, it removes a premium that is usually unavoidable.

The three services are the second thing, and they are the shape of the weekend rather than a tax.

An aperitif with live stations on the arrival evening, the wedding on the second day, a pizza party by the pool on the third: that is what a three-night destination wedding wants to be anyway. We always budget all three from the outset, because at €80, €200 and €80 a head on 60 people they are a substantial part of the total and not a rounding error.

The band is the last thing, and it is narrow. Sixty is the floor on every service and a hundred is where the estate stops being comfortable, so a list of 150 belongs somewhere else and a list of 40 pays for 60 three times over. We always settle the number here before the date.

Magic Day plans weddings at Masseria Santo Scalone from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the three nights and the narrow calendar they have to fit, the seated capacity confirmed in writing, the three services and what each of them should be, the symbolic ceremony and the comune of Ostuni for the legal part, the chairs and the design, the rooms in Ostuni for the guests beyond sixty, and the transfers from Brindisi.

We have worked across Puglia since the Bari office opened in 2014, and Ostuni is the part of it we know most closely. Tell us the dates you are looking at and how many people, and we will confirm what the estate can seat and what the three days come to.