“BY CHANCE, THIS has become a gay mecca,” says Jacopo Etro one September afternoon while drinking white wine, his Sicilian partner, Alessandro Genduso, off playing tennis, their 5-year-old daughter, Roberta, out with the nanny. “Because the prices are not so expensive and the beaches are nice,” he explains, adding that here in Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot, people wake up each morning and decide, based on the winds, whether the Adriatic or Ionian Sea is calmer for swimming. Etro, who’s 61 and avoids the cruisier spots along the coastline these days, suggests another reason why men from Rome, Milan and other European cities have begun transforming the area’s castles and masserias into hotels and guesthouses, or why discreet foreign dignitaries have set up weekend refuges: For two decades, the region has been governed by leftists; Puglia’s current president, Michele Emiliano, “is very gay-friendly,” Etro says. The previous president, Nichi Vendola, who served for a decade until 2015, was himself a gay man, one of the first out politicians in Italy. But Etro has more outré theories, too: “It’s also because of the inhabitants, you know? Being a little bit Greek,” he notes with a smile, referring to when Puglia was colonized by the Greeks in the eighth century B.C. “There are a lot of bisexual people here. They get married and then go both ways.”

The town in which he spends a few weeks each year, Matino, in the southern section of Salento, has been particularly claimed by gay men, yet it’s just one of 30 or so medieval villages an hour or two outside the Baroque city of Lecce that have become desirable for their privacy, architecture and slow pace. Etro and Genduso, a 48-year-old doctor, started coming down here from their home in Milan in 2018 not just because of the area’s liberal character but because of their newly renovated property: a 6,500-square-foot, two-story former nobleman’s villa with a roof-spanning terrace that looks out over the neighboring whitewashed buildings to the water. Although most of the structure dates to the 17th century, with sections of it remodeled in the 19th century, no one had lived there for nearly 50 years. “Fortunately, nobody came and ravaged it,” Etro says. “Because most of the people come here and do horrible things.” They might have added a mezzanine level, for instance, dividing the domed 18-foot-tall rooms, or created a more modern layout with lots of guest bedrooms and en suite bathrooms.

Instead, Etro decided, every room was to be kept in its place, fitting for a country manor in a traditional village that’s been maintained, for now, he says, “mostly in the state that it was.” Given how rich people lived four centuries ago, with distinct spaces for entertaining and relaxing, as well as separate ones where servants could clandestinely move about and manage everything, each floor of the home is its own maze of meandering living rooms, hallways, staircases and antechambers; there are three kitchens — a winter one, a summer one and an outdoor one — several sitting areas, three guest bedrooms, a formal dining room and dedicated wings for the couple and their daughter to watch television and sleep. Only once did the architect with whom Etro worked, a local woman named Lucia Cataldi who “knows the best artisans in the area,” tear down a wall to create better access to the ground-floor winter kitchen but, even then, she had two doors installed that exactly match the house’s many carved wooden ones. They updated the electricity, lighting and plumbing, but most of their work focused on fixing what previous residents had ruined: The best surprise came when they peeled back decades of paint and plaster on the vaulted and coffered ceilings, revealing elaborately decorated borders in lavender, periwinkle and blush pink.