Most of the hotels that have sprung up in Puglia in the last few years are not far from Bari, but they seem a world away economically. Originally, these farm compounds were surrounded by heavy walls constructed to defend against invaders. The majority were built in the fifteenth century, when Puglia was put under the protection of the Knights of Malta by papal decree. When one of the coastal castles raised the alarm of a potential invasion, all the farmers and livestock would retreat inside the walls, where they would remain for months at a time, relying for survival on huge underground storerooms holding reserves of food.

Agriculture was the main line of business, with a frantoio, or olive press, the centerpiece of the farm. Today, the compounds have been painstakingly re-created as luxury boutique hotels, taking advantage of the details that make them particular to Puglia. The surrounding groves of fig, lemon, orange, pear, and olive trees have been left unmanicured, and there's plenty of room for pools, spas, and cooking-school annexes.

After a night at the very upscale Masseria San Domenico, in Fasano, I move to the more informal Masseria Torre Coccaro, nearby, for a few days. A collection of whitewashed buildings with rust-colored shutters, unruly bougainvillea bushes growing up the sides, it also has an exquisite pink eighteenth-century church. I decide to dedicate the morning to Torre Coccaro's beach club, an enclave of white cushions, dark wood, and canvas umbrellas on a sliver of private sand about fifteen minutes away. Lounging on a deck chair, I watch the hundreds of sunbathers on the next beach. August in Italy is beach season, and the pilgrimage to the coast is decidedly nonreligious. Bronzed beauties paddle by on fluorescent rafts. Toddlers with inflatable armbands teeter on the shoreline. Teenage boys boot soccer balls on the hard sand or make plans for the evening on their most important accessories, cell phones whose repertoire of ring tones offers a quick education in current Italian hit singles.

The atmosphere is disarming and contagious. A couple sit on the edge of the rocks with a basket of squid. The man takes one and pounds it against the stones for five minutes, then hands it to the woman, who washes it over and over again in the cold seawater. The tenderizing ritual—an ancient one, I later discover—inspires me to head to the club's restaurant for my own seafood meal, a simple spaghetti with just-caught scampi.

After lunch, the desertlike heat drives people to retreat indoors for a long siesta behind heavy shutters. I drive through the sleepy, picturesque hill towns of Locorotondo and Cisternino and past miles of olive and almond trees. The olive trees here are hundreds—or even a thousand or more—years old, with huge gnarled trunks that twist and buckle like unwieldy sculptures. Caper bushes grow unfettered, and every spring their orchidlike flowers bloom by the thousands.