Casamatta

A Castle Dining Room in the Primitivo Heartland

The approach to Casamatta sets the register before a single dish arrives. The Vinilia Wine Resort occupies an early-20th-century castle a few kilometres outside Manduria, the town that functions as ground zero for Primitivo di Manduria, one of southern Italy's most characterful DOC wines. Mature olive trees flank the grounds, the kind of trees that take centuries to grow into their current silhouette, and the building itself carries the architectural weight of the Salento interior: stone, proportion, and an almost agricultural seriousness about the land it sits on. The dining room is bright and airy, with large windows that frame the outdoor terrace. In fine weather, that terrace is the place to sit.

This geography is not incidental. The cooking at Casamatta draws directly from it. The kitchen maintains its own garden on the property, and the fruit and vegetables grown there appear throughout the menus. In a region where the distance between soil and plate has always been short, that's less a marketing stance than a structural commitment. The result is a form of modern southern Italian cuisine that earns its Michelin star, awarded in 2024, through specificity rather than spectacle.

Where the Ingredients Come From, and Why That Shapes the Menu

Southern Italian fine dining has long occupied a complicated position within Italy's gastronomic hierarchy. The country's Michelin concentration has historically skewed north: houses like Le Calandre in Rubano, Dal Pescatore in Runate, and Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence hold multiple stars and anchor their reputations in the older fine-dining circuits of northern and central Italy. Three-star addresses like Osteria Francescana in Modena, Enrico Bartolini in Milan, and Piazza Duomo in Alba operate within dense urban dining ecosystems with immediate peer comparison. Casamatta occupies entirely different terrain: a rural resort table in Puglia's deep south, where the nearest serious culinary competition is geographically distant and the local produce tradition is simply different in character.

Primitivo grapes grow in iron-rich soil under a sun that accumulates sugar rapidly. The same conditions that produce deeply concentrated wine also produce tomatoes, figs, capers, aubergines, and legumes with intensity that northern-grown equivalents rarely match. A kitchen garden in this climate is not an amenity: it is access to raw materials that money cannot easily replicate by import. When the kitchen uses vegetables from that garden, it is working with produce calibrated to local conditions over generations.

Chef Pietro Penna returned to Puglia after accumulating experience at established restaurants elsewhere in Italy, and the menu reflects the perspective of someone who left, observed how other regions cook at a high level, and came back with the discipline to apply technique without erasing origin. That biographical arc, common among the current generation of southern Italian chefs, tends to produce cooking that is formally structured but tonally rooted.

Three Menus, One Vegetarian

Casamatta runs three tasting menus, one of which is entirely vegetarian. In a Puglian context, that decision has more weight than it might elsewhere. This is a region where cucina povera, the cooking of economic scarcity, historically produced some of Italy's most sophisticated vegetable cookery out of necessity. Fave e cicorie, ciceri e tria, frisa with tomato and oregano: these are not side dishes but load-bearing pillars of the local diet. A vegetarian tasting menu in Manduria draws from a tradition that pre-dates the contemporary restaurant industry's interest in plant-forward eating by several centuries.

The kitchen-garden supply makes the vegetarian menu something other than a concession to dietary preference. Produce grown on-site, harvested at peak season, and cooked within the same tasting-menu framework as the other menus puts the vegetarian format on equal structural footing. For the southern Salento in particular, where the harvest calendar runs from early spring through late autumn with exceptional density, the seasonal availability of that garden shapes what the menu can do at any given time of year.

The other two menus extend into meat and seafood territory, drawing from a coastline that is never far in this part of Puglia, the Ionian and Adriatic are both within reach, and from the inland agricultural supply that characterises the Taranto province. Google reviewers rate the experience at 4.6 from 131 reviews, a score that reflects a consistency the Michelin recognition in 2024 confirmed.

The Setting as Part of the Experience

Resort restaurants at this level in Italy operate within a particular set of expectations. The castle format and agricultural grounds put Casamatta in a specific physical category: you are not eating in a city restaurant that happens to be good, but in a property where the built environment, the land, and the kitchen are meant to read as a coherent whole. That coherence is easier to achieve at a resort with a genuine agricultural identity than at a generic luxury hotel that grafts a fine-dining room onto a property without culinary roots.

The dining room's large windows and the proximity of the outdoor terrace make the surrounding grounds a continuous presence during the meal. When the weather allows, which in the Puglia summer and through much of spring and autumn is most of the time, the outdoor option is the preferred format. The lighting design inside has been handled with enough care to avoid the common resort-restaurant error of over-brightness, and the modern furnishings avoid the overly formal register that can make hotel dining rooms feel detached from the food being served.

For visitors building a Manduria itinerary, Casamatta sits in clear relationship with the town's wine identity. The Vinilia Wine Resort frames the experience around Primitivo production, and the restaurant's wine list would logically emphasise local DOC and DOCG labels. For a broader view of the town's dining options, including more casual formats, see ES Cantina & Ristorante and our full Manduria restaurants guide.

Planning Your Visit

Casamatta is located on Contrada Ciracì, a few kilometres outside Manduria's town centre, within the Vinilia Wine Resort. The price tier sits at €€€€, placing it at the upper end of what the region offers and in the same bracket as Italy's leading tasting-menu addresses, though at single-star level rather than the three-star tier represented by houses like Uliassi in Senigallia or Quattro Passi in Marina del Cantone.

Booking enquiries should be directed through the Vinilia Wine Resort directly.

What Regulars Order at Casamatta

The tasting-menu format at Casamatta means the kitchen, rather than the guest, drives the sequence, so the question of what to order resolves into which of the three menus to choose. Guests with a strong preference for the local vegetable tradition and the kitchen-garden supply are well-served by the dedicated vegetarian menu, which carries the most direct expression of the ingredient-sourcing approach that earned the restaurant its Michelin star in 2024. Those who want to engage with Puglia's seafood alongside the garden produce will find the broader menus cover that territory. In either case, the outdoor terrace in fair weather is the preferable setting, and the wine pairing opportunity within the Primitivo DOC context is the obvious companion to whichever menu you choose.