If you’re looking for sun out of season but don’t want to travel too far, want to be wined and dined with local ingredients and tasty food, enjoy stunning scenery and world-class culture, the answer is easy. If you want to go to a non-native English-speaking country where everyone speaks English, meet friendly, welcoming people and eat ice-cream so good I would consider moving there for the luxury of eating it every day, it’s simple. Go to Tuscany.
Hot sun, great food, lovely people, impressive art and architecture – and all just under two hours flying time from the UK. Or, if your eco conscience is bothering you, take the train. Eurostar it from London to Paris, then on to Florence via Milan.
ARRIVING IN FLORENCE
Florence is the capital city and gateway to Tuscany, a region that enjoys an average annual temperature of 20 degrees, with eight hours of sun every day from spring. (Though it’s cheaper to fly to Pisa, just over an hour from Florence with regular fast bus and train connections.)
It’s is a cool city, stretching out from both banks of the Arno, giving it a glorious vista. It’s the final resting spot of Michelangelo and Galileo and the birthplace of Pinocchio. It holds nearly a third of the world’s art treasures according to UNESCO and the biggest collection of Renaissance art on the planet, which resides in the Uffizi Gallery.
To make the most of your time, stay central. The Gallery Hotel Art is located right beside the famous Ponte Vecchio, the medieval closed-in stone bridge, lined with jewellery shops. The smart 4-star boutique hotel has a buzzy downstairs bar, a library dining room and stylish bedrooms – opt for a top floor room with a shady terrace. Dine stylishly in its sister restaurant, the chic Café dell’Oro, around the corner – authentic and inventive Italian dishes with riverside views.
It’s surrounded by narrow cobblestone streets and huge open piazzas and nearby attractions include the Santa Croce, where you’ll find the tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo as well as works by Giotto and Donatello, and the aforementioned Uffizi Gallery, built in 1581 for the de Medici family with masterpieces dating from the 14th century including many from their private collections.
You can visit some of the family tombs at the Basilica of San Lorenzo and one of their former homes at the Pitti Palace Museum, which is surrounded by great little neighbourhood cafes. There are markets selling local art, souvenirs and Pinocchios everywhere; his story was published in the late 19th century by Florentine writer Collodi.
And while it might be hard to leave Florence, you should. The Tuscan countryside is on your doorstep and it would be a criminal shame to miss those ancient medieval hill towns, vineyards, olive groves and stunning views.
OFF TO VOLTERRA
I enjoyed those views in style from the Borgo Pignano in Volterra, just over one hour’s drive from the city, travelling up mountains as the sun set, catching tantalising glimpses of scenic valleys. But it was pitch black when we arrived and despite the lanterns flickering on the terraces and a floodlit cocktail bar in the garden, I could see nothing else. So, I went to bed excited for morning (and that hasn’t happened so much since I was a child at Christmas).
I wasn’t disappointed. Miles of glorious countryside stretched out before me as I opened the shutters in my suite under the eaves of the 18th century villa, the sky gently pink. I was also pretty excited about the grand piano in my bedroom (yes, you read it right – grand piano!), not to mention the 4-poster bed and the huge colourfully painted bathroom.
I explored the estate as the sun rose – the infinity pool carved out of a limestone quarry, the terraces with armchairs overlooking the valley, the gardens with their golden-coloured family maisonettes glowing in the early morning Tuscan sun, all with stupendous views.
The hotel is set on a 700-acre estate with a working organic farm that supplies a large amount of its produce – heritage vegetables and herbs from the garden, wines from the vineyard, oil from the olive groves and eggs from the hens. There are pigs and a stable of horses, forests with flocks of deer and pheasants. You can tour the farm in a 4×4, by mountain bike or on horseback and take a picnic to enjoy on the way.
After breakfast, a local artist gave me a lesson in oil painting on the garden terrace. I learned how to select a landscape view, mix colours and build a scene on canvas to take home with me, coming over all lady-artist-in-Tuscany for three hours (cost €50). Afterwards I lay by the infinity pool, looking over the valleys in the 28-degree October heat and thought, it’s 12 degrees and raining in the UK.
The pool is heated by woodchip-fired boilers that, along with solar panels, fuel the hotel’s heating and hot water systems using timber supplied from their forests. There are no plastic bottles here. Water is served in re-useable glass bottles and bathroom toiletries are supplied in ceramic containers – both toiletries and containers are handmade locally. The gardens are fed by filtered harvested rainwater, natural and man-made lakes irrigate the farm. No surprise really that the hotel won the Conde Nast Johansens Excellence Award for Best Sustainable Hotel in 2019.
The restaurants offer seasonal and organic food from the estate and local area. Eight-course fine dining tasting menus offer the chance to eat direct from the farm – truffles and mushrooms, snails and cured meats, vegetables and a whole selection of cakes, all served with a selection of organic and biodynamic wines from the region – and that’s just one option! You can eat in one of the villa’s cosy dining rooms or at a communal shared table in front of a medieval fireplace
AND FINALLY… MAREMMA
Two hours away from Volterra, in the Maremma region where chic Florentines and Senesi holiday, the landscape is very different. Bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea, the area has more Blue Flag beaches than anywhere else in Italy, bar Liguria. Around the 5-star L’Andana hotel the countryside is completely flat, the seaside is a short drive away and the Maremma Nature Park stretches along the coast, perfect for walks.
The hotel’s large estate was once the site of Duke of Tuscany’s summer residence. Today it has two swimming pools, a golf range, tennis courts and its own vineyard. There’s a large indoor spa and a thunderstorm, cutting through the hot sunshine on the day I arrive, gives me the perfect excuse to curl up there on a sunlounger all afternoon.
Rooms are set out in the main villa – where my room is kitted out with a luxury lounging area and a sumptuous bath the size of a small pool – and the nearby more family-focused farmhouse.
There’s a Michelin-starred restaurant in the grounds but if you want to eat a more normally priced dinner, there’s an all-day menu available in the main hotel at La Villa restaurant or you can head out to explore the local area – the towns of Castiglione della Pescaia and Grosseto are nearby, Florence and Siena are a 2-hour drive.
And early the next morning I take that 2-hour drive to the airport and back to the UK, rested, sun-kissed and cultured up. But already missing the ice cream.
CONTACTS AND PRICES
Gallery Hotel Art from £200 per night, excluding breakfast, visit lungarnocollection.com/gallery-hotel-art; Borgo Pignano from €300 per night, including breakfast, visit borgopignano.com or call +39 0588 35032; L’Andana from €440 per night, including breakfast, visit www.andana.it, call +39 0564 944 800 or email info@andana.it