Pollicastro Boutique Hotel

Pollicastro Boutique Hotel

Lecce is often called the Florence of the South, which undersells it a little. The Baroque architecture here is more exuberant and more intact than almost anywhere else in Italy, built from the local limestone, pietra leccese, a warm golden stone that carves easily and ages beautifully. The city rewards slow walking and a certain willingness to get lost. Pollicastro Boutique Hotel, in a 16th-century palace in the heart of the historic centre, is a good base from which to do exactly that. The hotel has 12 rooms, which is small enough that the word intimate is accurate rather than euphemistic. The building is Palazzo dei Perroni, on the street running from Porta San Biagio to Piazza Sant'Oronzo, steps from the church of San Matteo and a few minutes' walk from the cathedral. The palace itself has its own mythology: a 17th-century manuscript records that Saint Francis of Assisi knocked on this door in 1219 and witnessed a miracle, which is why there is an angel holding bread carved above the entrance. The family who owns and runs the hotel, the Miglietta family, has designed and made most of what you see inside, room by room, over years. The result is genuinely arresting: soaring vaulted ceilings, enormous stone walls, custom metalwork, antique furniture, and lighting that makes the whole place feel theatrical in the best sense. This is not a hotel with a pool or a spa wing. The luxury is entirely in the building, the rooms, the breakfast, and the location. The Ninfeo Suite, the most extraordinary room in the house, goes down a staircase to a bathroom with an underground cave pool fed by the palazzo's ancient cistern, under 16th-century lunette ceilings. It is the kind of thing that exists in almost no other hotel in the world and is reason enough to make the trip. The rooftop terrace looks out over the Baroque roofline of Lecce, which is its own reward at any hour. Brindisi airport is about 30 minutes away. The Salento coast, some of the best beach in southern Italy, is an easy drive. But Lecce itself, done properly, takes several days, and Pollicastro makes that very easy to justify. The short version: Twelve rooms in a 16th-century Lecce palace, designed with phenomenal personal attention and including one of the most unusual suites in Italy. Not a resort, not a spa hotel, but for someone who wants to be inside the fabric of one of Italy's most beautiful Baroque cities, the right choice entirely.