Overview
Move over, every cooking show ever made — and every hotel-based reality TV series as well. If there's ever been an ideal setting for any culinary feat or holiday highlights, it's Castello di Ugento in the southern tip of Puglia in Italy.
It's not every day that you get to stay in a 1000-year-old castle that was once a Norman fortress and a lavish 17th century palace, let alone cook up a storm in one, but that's just what the site now offers. After its latest revamp, Castello di Ugento now boasts welcoming a luxe place to stay thanks to a nine-suite boutique hotel, a 1000-square-metre museum wing with restored frescoes, and an extensive culinary centre as well.
It's the latter that should entice foodies from around the world, playing permanent host to an Italian cookery school in the castle's old storehouse. State-of-the-art equipment sits inside ancient, lovingly restored walls, with classes offered year-round — on an educational basis for students from the Culinary Institute of America as part of a semester abroad, and for hotel guests. House chef Odette Fada, other well-known chefs and local nonnas all impart their wisdom, spanning cutting-edge techniques and traditional, generations-old family recipes alike.
Proving the type of place dreams are made of — because we all fantasise about spending warm Italian summers cooking, lazing about in luxury and roaming through scenic greenery, don't we? — the castle also features a working 17th-century kitchen garden, complete with over 100 kinds of herbs, fruit trees and vegetables, as well as event facilities. In the near future, visitors will also be able to enjoy wine tastings in a 500-year-old cisterna, or spend the night at a nearby restored farmhouse, which has its own pool, tennis court and fruit garden on site.
For more information, visit the Castello di Ugento website.
Images: Castello di Ugento.