Reimagining Manduria.

A 2,700-year-old town. A modern vision.

ManduriaShire Srl acquires, restores, and repurposes historic properties in Manduria's centro storico, in Salento, Puglia: the ancient Messapian heart of one of the least discovered towns in the south of Italy.

Our thesis is simple. These buildings, with their volte a stella ceilings and centuries of stories, deserve better than abandonment. We restore them ethically, we fill them with life, and we offer them to people who see what we see: a place worth belonging to. Every building that finds its family brings the next one into the circle. The town grows back, one house at a time.

Why Manduria, of all places.

Because it is home. We were born here: we are not investors who found a picturesque town on a map, we are manduriani who came back. And because Manduria is alive. A real piazza, a festa in summer, neighbours who stop you in the lane to ask about the works. Many historic centres have emptied into museums or scenography. This one still works as a town, and a town that works cannot be replicated somewhere else.

And because of a piece of arithmetic that is easy to check and hard to satisfy.

Since April 2026, Italy's 7% flat tax for foreign pensioners applies to towns in the south with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. That one condition rules out every city. What is left is mostly villages, and a village asks you to give something up.

So make a list of what you would not give up, and see how many places survive it.

A town under 30,000, so the regime applies. Manduria had 29,528 residents on 1 January 2026, and has been shrinking for fifteen consecutive years: the margin widens each year instead of closing.

A hospital in town, with an emergency department, cardiology, general surgery, internal medicine, nephrology, orthopaedics, obstetrics and paediatrics. Taranto's larger hospital is forty minutes away.

An economy that works all year, not a season. This is the heart of Primitivo di Manduria country. The wine, the olives and the greenhouses run through the winter, which is why the town does not close in November.

An international airport within the hour. Brindisi is 46 kilometres away, about forty-five minutes.

The sea close, but not under your windows. Ten miles of coast, fifteen minutes by car. San Pietro in Bevagna has held the Blue Flag in 2024, 2025 and 2026. In August the marina fills and the old town stays quiet, which is the arrangement most people actually want.

A centre you can cross on foot, with a market, a station, and a piazza that is still used.

And houses you can still buy. Stone houses in the old town, with star-vaulted ceilings, a courtyard or a terrace, waiting to be restored to your own taste. Not one or two of them: streets of them. In the towns that summer tourism has already taken, the same house costs several times as much, when it comes up at all.

Run that list against a map of southern Italy and see how short it gets. We are not saying Manduria is the best town in Salento, Puglia. We are saying the list is short, and that we happen to have been born on it.

How we work: three rules.

We listen before we build. A forgotten building is not torn down: it is listened to. The door of number 13 was restored and put back exactly where it has always been, and the patterned cement tiles found under the dust stay where they are.

We build by hand. The two arches of the courtyard took five months, a wooden centring and tufo blocks cut on site, the way this courtyard was built the first time. Local masons, local stone, local pace.

One house at a time. Every house that finds its family funds the restoration of the next one. No shortcuts, no scale for its own sake: the town grows back at the pace of the people who join it.

See how we work, in the restoration diary →

We were born here.

A historic centre does not die of old buildings. It dies when people stop meeting. So the question we ask about every decision is not whether it makes the town prettier, but whether it gives someone a reason to stay.

What this means in practice →

Founded by two manduriani.

After twenty-eight years in Asia, Maria Pia Ancora and Mario Dimitri came home to build Italy's first longevity retreat inside a living historic centre.