Masseria Spina wedding

Spina is a fortified farm in the Parco Rurale above Monopoli, and it looks like nothing else in this set. The main front is red ochre, baroque, with a double external staircase and a stone loggia, and there is a squat watchtower at one end with the Adriatic behind it. The brochure calls the place an open-air museum, which is closer to the truth than most venue copy.

Underneath it all is a frantoio ipogeo, an olive mill cut down into the rock, where the oil was pressed out of the reach of the summer heat. The olive grove around it is one of the oldest in Europe, and there is a chapel, an Arab citrus garden with a pool, and a courtyard that has been in use for a thousand years.

The masseria works as a route rather than a room: couples take two, three or more of its spaces and move the party through them as the evening goes.

The main courtyard, under the red façade and its staircase. It takes the ceremony, the welcome drinks, the buffet and the served courses, and it is where most weddings here spend the evening.

The thousand-year-old olive grove, with the underground mill and the tower in view. Welcome drinks and ceremonies happen here, among trees that were already old when the masseria was built.

A plain terrace with the sea in front of it, used for drinks, for ceremonies and for the antipasti buffet with live corners. It is the coolest place on the estate on a hot evening.

An Arab citrus garden with stone arches and a swimming pool, which is only available when the residences are rented. That makes it another reason to take the rooms, alongside the hours.

Nine hundred square metres of them: the Sala della Mangiatoia with its ancient feeding troughs, the Sala Colonna under a ribbed vault around a single column, the Sala Serra with its windows, and the Lamione. Between them a wedding of 140 can move indoors without losing the room.

A Masseria Spina wedding starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 80 to 140 guests.

€3,000 for the location. That covers the estate, the hostesses who receive the suppliers and the guests, and the setting up of the ceremony. It is a small figure by the standards of this coast, and the reason is that the catering rather than the hire is where the masseria earns.

From €125 a head with the drink included, on a minimum of 60 guests. A smaller wedding is taken midweek, down to 30 adults, against a top-up. The price covers the service equipment, the linen, the dining room and kitchen staff, the mise en place, the tables, the chairs and the buffet set-ups the masseria already owns, which is more than most per-head figures include.

The food is the point here. The buffet runs as live corners: a cheesemaker pulling mozzarella and burrata, a baker frying panzerotti and turning out Bari focaccia, a cold-cuts corner of Martina Franca capocollo and caciocavallo podolico, a raw sea corner of oysters and scampi.

The open bar, which is priced by the drink over a minimum of 150; the residences; the flowers and the design, although the masseria can make both; the music, the lighting and the Italian music licence; the photography; and the transfers.

Six historic residences sleeping 22 to 32 people: twelve double bedrooms, eight single beds in the living areas, and twelve bathrooms between them. They are vaulted in stone, furnished with antiques, and each has been done differently. One has a copper bath standing in a barrel-vaulted room; another has a dining room cut into the rock, whitewashed, with a window onto the olives.

The residences are hired together for the run of the stay, with the linen and the final cleaning included and breakfast added per head.

They are not an optional extra here, whatever the price list suggests. Renting them is what moves the music curfew from half past eleven to three in the morning, and it is what opens the Arab garden and its pool. Everyone beyond the thirty-odd beds stays in Monopoli, eighteen minutes down the hill.

The masseria is inland, in Monopoli’s rural park, high enough to see the sea from the tower and far enough from the coast road to hear nothing.

Monopoli is 18 minutes, Polignano a Mare 23, Alberobello 36 and Savelletri 31, which puts the trulli country and the pick of the coast within half an hour. Bari itself is 54 minutes.

Bari is the airport, an hour and three minutes, and Brindisi is an hour and seven. Spina is far enough north that the two swap places compared with the rest of Puglia, which is worth knowing when flights are being booked.

The residences decide the wedding, and nothing else here comes close. Take them and the music plays until three in the morning and the Arab garden and its pool are yours; leave them and everything stops at half past eleven. We always plan a wedding here with the residences taken: half past eleven is dinner finishing, not a party.

The second thing is the ceremony, and it needs checking rather than assuming.

The brochure says the masseria holds civil ceremonies. Its own event manager told us in April that at present it cannot. We take the later answer, plan for a symbolic ceremony under the old olive or on the terrace, and arrange the legal part at a comune, but we get the current position in writing every time because a brochure that says otherwise is still in circulation.

The third is the value. Three thousand for the location and a hundred and twenty-five a head including the drink is the lowest combination in this set by some distance, and the food is not the compromise: the live corners here are as good as anything on the coast. What you give up is the polish of a hotel and the machinery that comes with it.

Magic Day plans weddings at Masseria Spina from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and the residences that go with it, which spaces the evening moves through and in what order, the symbolic ceremony and the comune that will register the marriage, the menu and the tasting with Le Cucine di Masseria Spina, the design and the flowers, the rooms in Monopoli for the rest of the guest list, and the coaches up from the coast.

We have worked across Puglia since the Bari office opened in 2014, and this corner between Monopoli and the trulli is the busiest part of it. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the evening costs and how late it can run.