The Prete family house

Vicolo Tessitori, Scafati

The house stands in an alley named after a trade — the Weavers’ Alley. The looms were at the end of the street, not in here: this has always been a house, never a workshop.

Those looms were my father’s. He set them up in 1948, just back from the war.

A man comes home from the front and the first thing he does is start a trade again: from those looms, at the end of this street, our story began. The house at one end of the alley, the work at the other.

It’s why, when we talk about roots here, it isn’t a figure of speech: it’s a hundred metres of street.

1929 is the year we have always carried with us: it’s when it was finished, and it’s the one written under the name. That the walls first started going up in 1920 is something handed down to us — we have no papers for it, it’s family memory.

It was built by a cousin of my grandfather’s — a Prete too.

In the seventies the alley was my courtyard: I played football there with the kids from the street, and this was the house I played in front of. In the nineties we bought it. It never left the family: it changed branch, and ended up with someone who had been a child in that alley.

It isn’t a holiday complex converted out of something else. It’s the family house that, for a few years now, guests come into as well.

A courtyard house

The palazzo is built the way they built them then: rooms all around, the courtyard inside, and the garden in the courtyard.

From the alley you see nothing. You walk in, and you see paradise: the trees, the gravel, the lemons are in there, closed inside the walls, and from outside nobody knows they exist.

It’s why guests always write the same thing — a quiet place, un lugar tranquilo, ein toller Urlaub — and it isn’t a decorating choice: it’s how the house is built. The windows don’t face the street. They face the garden.

Nobody builds them like this any more. This one is still here.

It started with her

Therese, my wife, loves gardens.

In 2017 the palazzo was falling down. There was no plan, no idea, nothing at all: just a courtyard abandoned for years. And she, stubbornly, kept looking after the lemon trees. Nobody had asked her to, and it served no purpose.

That is where the impulse came from, in me, to bring the story back to life.

The garden didn’t come after the renovation, as you’d assume looking at it today. It came first, and it’s the reason the renovation happened at all. The trees were saved before the house was.

The panel in the courtyard

What follows hangs in the house. We reproduce it as it is.

This family courtyard, the Prete home, was born in 1929. Within it, the garden came to life as a space for rest, work, and play—and with it, a promise: that here, among the branches, life would have space to grow.

Three generations of the Prete family have grown up among these trees. Children have run, played, been cuddled and scolded, laughed and cried beneath the same canopies that today offer shade and memory.

The trees have watched time go by, yet they have endured, season after season, with the quiet strength of those who do not forget.

In the 2000s, for various reasons, this courtyard was abandoned. The garden, once vibrant and full of life, slowly lost its beauty.

In 2017, seeing what remained, I decided to restore dignity to this place through a renovation meant not only to rebuild, but to honor the authenticity and soul born here nearly a century earlier.

I wanted to bring back beauty, while preserving what made Domus Prete unique: its trees, its stones, its memory.

And I wanted to offer our children, who live far away, a pleasant, welcoming, and authentic place to return to when they come back to where they were born. A corner that still feels like home, where they can see beauty and feel that roots exist and endure.

But the true rebirth of the garden began even before 2017, thanks to my wife Therese.

With quiet and constant care, she tended to the abandoned plants, protected the roots, and gave new life to forgotten corners.

She built flowerbeds, planted flowers, and nurtured the soil. Every blooming corner you see today bears the mark of her dedication.

To Therese, who made this garden a visible caress of her love.

S. Prete

The trees are the same ones

When you sleep here, the garden outside your window is the one where three generations of children played. The lemons you find on the table come off those trees. The cement tiles on the floors were laid nearly a century ago.

It isn’t a set. It’s a house that held on, put back on its feet by someone who was born in it.

That’s why it’s called Domus Prete, and why under the name it says since 1929.