When people hear you’re restoring a 19th-century stone farmhouse in Italy, the vision is usually romantic: sipping espresso under olive trees, admiring ancient vaulted ceilings, and watching the evening sun hit peach-yellow stone.
What people don’t usually picture is standing in a dusty room trying to figure out where on earth a water pipe from 1850 leads, or staring at a single, frayed wire hanging from a ceiling hook.
Before we can even think about paint colors, kitchen layouts, or landscaping, we have to tackle the unglamorous backbone of the entire project: bringing modern water and electricity to a property that has been sitting abandoned for years.
Upstair vs. Downstairs: A House Split in Two
Because the masseria was left empty for so long, step one has been figuring out what’s actually here.
Historically, masseria’s were built with a very clear divide: the land-owning family lived upstairs in the brighter, grander quarters, while livestock and working farm animals were kept directly below them on the ground floor.
Walking through the house today, you can still see that exact division carved into the building. Upstairs, there are signs of human life from decades past, simple light fixtures hanging from the ceilings and old switches on the walls. Downstairs, where our living room will eventually be, it’s a complete shell with stone feeding troughs along the walls and zero infrastructure whatsoever.
Technically, there is an existing electrical supply connected to the property from whenever it was last inhabited. But to say it’s not up to modern safety standards is putting it gently! Parts of the house have rudimentary wiring, while other rooms have nothing at all.
Our plan is to completely rip out the old system and rewire the entire house from scratch. Down the track, budget permitting, we’d love to install solar panels with battery storage. Puglia gets endless months of intense Mediterranean sunshine, and given that Celsa works in renewable energy, bringing clean solar power to an 1800s stone building feels like the absolute dream integration for us.
The Water Puzzle: Cisterns, Trucks, and Drilling Deep
If electricity is a challenge, water in Southern Italy is an art form. Puglia is famously dry, and historically, every drop of rainwater was precious.
Underneath our property, there are three massive, ancient underground cisterns, one directly beneath the main house, and two buried under the surrounding garden area. Right now, they’re still holding old rainwater. Step one will be pumping them completely dry, scrubbing them down, and restoring the internal rendering so they can be safely used to store clean water again.
When it comes to keeping those cisterns full, most people in the countryside rely on one of two options:
- Water Delivery Trucks (Autobotte): Having local tankers drive out to dump thousands of liters directly into your cisterns. It’s relatively cheap per delivery, but over time, especially if you’re maintaining gardens and living there full-time—the ongoing costs and logistics start to add up.
- Drilling a Well (Pozzo Artesiano): Drilling deep into the underground water table.
While drilling a well involves a significant upfront cost and navigating a mountain of administrative permits, we’re leaning heavily toward it. Having our own reliable, long-term water source gives us complete independence and the flexibility we need to care for the house and garden for decades to come.
Preserving Historic Stone vs. Hiding Pipes
One of our biggest anxieties with modernising the utilities is making sure we don’t destroy the original character of the building in the process.
In some areas of the house, we have beautiful, original floor tiles that we refuse to touch or cut into. In those rooms, running plumbing and electrical conduits requires a really delicate touch, finding existing floor channels, routing along baseboards, or working through interior wall gaps.
In other areas, thankfully, previous owners did us a favour. During the 1960s and 70s, parts of the interior were covered in thick, rough plaster that completely smothered the original stone. We’ll be hacking away all that modern plaster anyway to expose the historical masonry underneath, which gives us the perfect opportunity to hide new wiring and pipework before restoring the stone finish.
The Patience Required
We’re still in the early planning and permitting phases, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Italian bureaucracy already, it’s that everything takes about three times longer than you think it will. Getting permits to drill a well, securing power grid upgrades, and coordinating with local technicians from afar is a slow dance.
It’s easy to feel impatient when you just want to see the house looking beautiful, but getting these foundational systems right is what turns a romantic stone ruin into a comfortable, lasting family home.
In our next post, we’re stepping inside the house to look at the fun stuff: peeling back layers of plaster, uncovering hidden stone arches, and planning the floor layout!
