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Masseria Ferarelli
The Rooms at the Masseria

February 24, 2022

The Rooms at the Masseria

The Rooms: Masseria Ferarelli – Trepizzi currently has three rooms for its “temporary residents”.

All of our rooms have a private bathroom with shower, TV, safe, kettle, tea and herbal tea station, wine cooler, an outdoor patio furnished with stone benches, table and chairs, and free Wi-Fi.

The rooms can be taken by separate, independent families, giving each one adequate space and privacy, or (as they can be connected to one another) they can host a single large family or a group of families / friends who choose to share the whole property with all its indoor and outdoor spaces. For your masseria room booking you can choose from:

Culummu Room

This room of about 25 m² with private bathroom takes its dialect name from one of the fig varieties growing at the masseria. The Culummu room has a furnished private patio of about 25 m² and, with an extra bed, can sleep up to 3 adults.

Rizzeddhra Room

This room of about 25 m² with private bathroom takes its dialect name from one of the fig varieties growing at the masseria. The Rizzeddhra room has a furnished private patio of about 25 m² and, with an extra bed, can sleep up to 3 adults.

Uttata Room

The smallest of the three, this room of about 20 m² with private bathroom also takes its dialect name from one of the fig varieties growing at the masseria. The room has a small furnished terrace of about 15 m² overlooking the most secluded part of the property and can sleep 2 adults.

Amenities in our Rooms

Traditional Salento bed with “cisteddri” trestles and wooden boards

King-size (Culummu and Rizzeddhra) and queen-size (Uttata) memory foam mattress

Pure cotton sheets

Handcrafted Salento textiles

Pure cotton bath sheets and towels

Shower / Hairdryer / Courtesy toiletries

Indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi

Satellite Smart TV / Safe

Salento sideboard / Drinks and snacks corner

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The Areas of Our Masseria

The Areas of Our Masseria

Masseria in Salento: the historic part (of which we have managed to preserve only a few sections) dates back to the early 1900s. It was laid out around a threshing floor with a well at its centre; the building was a country farmstead made up of a communal area with a large fireplace, which served as both dining room and sleeping quarters, and a larger building used at first as a tool store and stable and later as a warehouse for storing tobacco. This last building collapsed through disuse and was then rebuilt by salvaging and reusing the original materials (such as the fireplace, the stone benches, the old hand-cut Pietra Leccese blocks and the traditional “petti de palummu”, the corbels jutting out from the walls which in the past were used to support the beams and poles of canopies or to mark rights of use, known in dialect as “iussi”, from the Latin ius = right). The rest of the present building is more recent and was built using the most modern construction techniques, but with great care to showcase the materials and distinctive architectural features of the rural buildings in the area. Typical local materials and stones were used, above all Cutrofiano tufa, Carparo from Acquarica del Capo and the ever-present stone of Cursi and Corigliano, commonly known as Pietra Leccese or, in dialect, “liccisu”. The Threshing Floor: in the past this space played a very important part in social and economic life. Specifically, it was a place of work, used both for drying the produce of the land in the sun (above all figs and tomatoes) and for threshing and cleaning pulses and cereals, which, after being beaten to separate them from their dry pods, were “ientulati”. (On windy days they were slowly poured from a bucket held up high, so that after threshing the wind could separate the edible part – heavier – from the dry bits of pod – lighter and so carried away by the wind.) The Pergola with the Cistern: This part was completely rebuilt following the stories of Grandpa Toto, who remembered, as a child, “walking along a colonnade leading to the cistern, covered with pergolas of white pizzutella grapes and surrounded by flowers”. Following these clues, we found the opening of the cistern, sealed under some old stone blocks and hidden by brambles; around it we rebuilt the old “pistale” (the cistern mouth), the avenue and the pergola, which in perspective links back up with the old building. Here too we used salvaged materials, such as the old stone blocks from the cistern mouth, the small wrought-iron arch with its pulley (trozzula) and the iron beams that top the columns of the pergola and support the new pizzutella vines planted along the whole avenue in 2016. Alternating with the vines, we also planted various kinds of roses and Mediterranean scrub plants, above all rosemary, lavender and myrtle. Around the cistern we have recreated a small space with Pietra Leccese benches that can host small events for up to 20 people, for an open-air aperitivo or small business meetings, surrounded by the peace and quiet of the Salento countryside. The Pajara (or lu Pajaru): this typical stone building was built using the dry-stone technique and reinforced on the inside with tufa blocks to make it more welcoming. In its architectural form and in the materials used to build it, it faithfully reflects the typical structures dotted across the Salento countryside. Its name is also etymologically close to our family’s surname. In the past the structure served as a shelter for farm tools and as a store for straw and hay. Today it stands next to the orchard and has a small patio with two columns supporting the wisteria pergola, which, when in bloom, makes this corner of our masseria enchanting and fairytale-like.

The Etymology of Our Masseria’s Name

The Etymology of Our Masseria’s Name

The Masseria Ferarelli - Trepizzi property covers about 15,000 m² in the Vicinale Doleo area, within the municipality of Diso, in the Province of Lecce, equidistant from the small villages of Diso, Marittima and Andrano. Our masseria lies right on the edge of the Costa Otranto - Santa Maria di Leuca and Bosco di Tricase Regional Nature Park, just 3 km from the sea (the Acquaviva cove) and about 4.5 km from the little piazza of Castro Marina. The property is the result of joining two plots that were previously known as: Ferarelli (or Ferareddrhi): a local term that probably comes from the combination of the dialect word “fore”, meaning countryside, and “aricelli”, which refers to a small threshing floor used for threshing cereals but above all pulses, which have always been grown in this area and for a long time provided food and a living for the farming families of the area. The red clay soils found here favour the growing of pulses and give excellent yields. This plot has belonged to the Pagliara family for many generations and is still recorded in the land registry as a ficheto, that is, an area for growing figs; Trepizzi: in dialect this literally means “three points”, after the triangular shape of the plot, which is bounded by Via Vecchia Castiglione and Vicinale Doleo. This piece of land is very special because in its recent history, that is over the last 150 years, it has served a number of purposes, which we have been able to piece together from the stories of the local elders: for the last 30 years, until it was bought by its current owners, it lay completely abandoned and uncultivated, which allowed wild vegetation to take hold and an astonishingly concentrated biodiversity of Mediterranean flora to flourish across just a few thousand square metres; before that, the same land was used to grow tobacco, another vital source of income in Salento until the late 1970s and early 1980s. The shape of this land and of the neighbouring plots, however, leaves no doubt about what it once was: a quarry of limestone tufa blocks that were “zuccati” by hand (zoccu is the pickaxe, hence the dialect term zuccare, which literally means cut with a pickaxe) and used to build the old villages nearby. This plot was acquired by the Pagliara – Lisci family in 2018.

Our Most Important Legacy

Our Most Important Legacy

After Dad died, I found myself sorting out the storerooms and sheds at home and out in the countryside. Tools, sacks, mats, utensils of every kind (seemingly useless), salvaged and kept. And then ropes, nets, sheets… Stored in an old fridge used as a sort of safe, arranged in a myriad of containers of every type and shape (jerrycans, jars, screw-top bottles, boxes…), carefully selected and catalogued, there were a great many seeds. Pumpkins, Courgette, Meloncella, Round tomato, Winter tomato, Basil, Turnip tops, Mugnulu (Green Cabbage), Chicory, Romanelle, Onions, Garlic, Parsley, Celery, Chard… and then: Chickpeas, Black Chickpeas, Peas, Roveja, Broad beans, Lupins, Dòlica (Grass peas), Lentils, Beans, Black-eyed beans, Borlotti beans, Green beans… I stood there, amazed that, unlike the rest of the room, which seemed to be in total disarray, this corner, this fridge full of compartments, was so neatly organised... Mice! I told myself – he had arranged the seeds in the fridge like this to protect them from mice, it was obvious! I went back to the cleaning; I was in a hurry to tidy up and put things in order, throwing away everything that seemed useless to me, and that is what I did. I started with a thorough clear-out, trying to keep all the tools that might still come in handy, as well as the oldest ones, as a keepsake for the future. Sacks, ropes, canes, ladders: I sorted everything out, removing and throwing away whatever was superfluous, but there was one thing I couldn’t work out: how was I going to get rid of that bulky, ugly fridge? It was too heavy to move on my own and, above all, I had no idea where to put it… I’d think about it later. A few days later, while I was chatting with a friend, he told me that this kind of waste is in demand, because various materials such as iron, copper and other metals can be recovered from it. He gave me the number of a man who collected scrap metal: I could call him and he would take care of carting away that bulky piece of junk, and at no cost at all! I called him straight away and we agreed that the next day he would come and load up the fridge along with other scrap metal I no longer needed and had to get rid of. They say it’s always best to sleep on it, and so it was: in the night I was literally struck by a very simple thought: That fridge was the Legacy handed down to me by my Father. I didn’t sleep a wink all night and, afraid that “the scrap man” would take away my safe with Dad’s legacy inside, by 6 a.m. I was already out in the countryside… luckily it was still there! I carefully emptied the fridge, putting all those jars into wooden crates, so that the fridge was ready for the scrap man. The “Treasure” was safe at last; now I could get rid of the safe! That was where my passion for the countryside began.

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