GO TUSCANY: Fabulous scenery, beaches within easy reach and interesting hill towns to visit make living the Tuscan dream a possibility, writes CONOR POPE
TUSCANY IS THE HOME of slow food but the beautiful rust-coloured hill town I’m standing in seems more like the home of no food. That’s not to say there aren’t any restaurants here in Suvereto. In fact, the town’s narrow cobbled streets are lined with trattorias with mouth-watering menus nailed to gnarled wooden door frames, promising wild boar ragù, home-cooked truffle ravioli and fresh seafood.
All this deliciousness could and should be washed down with local wine as our group sits laughing merrily at rickety tables dressed with red-checked tablecloths. But that’s not happening. It’s lunch time and all the restaurants are closed. So too are the shops and, apart from the sound of a solitary scooter buzzing through the walled town’s ancient gate as it struggles up the hill to the main square, this place is quite dead.
Peace and quiet are well and good – and a nice respite from the maddening crowds of nearby Florence and Siena – but there are cranky people here who need to be fed. Fast.
Eventually an open restaurant is found and what comes out is devoured at a pace which is anything but slow. It is only then we can appreciate our surroundings. Suvereto is undoubtedly a beautiful town – there can be few places as picture-postcard-pretty as a Tuscan hill town in the early summer – but like many such towns, a decades-long pattern of migration to newer, more functional suburbs outside its crumbling walls has stripped it of atmosphere and turned into more of a museum than a living, breathing town. What it needs is a little hustle. And maybe some bustle.
Nearby Pisa has hustle and bustle in spades. Many Tuscanophiles dismiss Pisa as a tourist trap made famous thanks to some shoddy engineering and a topographical quirk. This impression, while understandable, is wrong.
A visit to Pisa and – more specifically – the Piazza dei Miracoli where the Leaning Tower stands, is certainly a tiresome experience, with endless queuing and overpriced food of poor quality. But stay a night, away from the Piazza, and the town comes alive. As the sun sets, tour buses vanish to be replaced by locals eating and drinking in cheap restaurants hidden in the town centre’s back streets or sipping wines in enotecas with stunning views of the River Arno as it snakes its way lazily through the city.
The island of Elba is within easy reach of Pisa, with ferries departing from the heavily industrialised port of Piombino, a town best seen from behind, every hour. The island is little visited but a real gem. It is so lovely, you’d have to wonder why Napoleon was in such a mad rush to flee after his exile here following the collapse of his first imperialist adventure in 1813.
The bright orange and yellow paint peeling off the buildings in the labyrinthine centre of the main town of Portoferraio gives it a wonderfully shabby charm, but there is nothing shabby about Napoleon’s two majestic homes in the town. Both are worth a visit, ideally on a hired bike – the island has an excellent bike rental scheme similar to the Dublin Bikes system. Elba is popular amongst Europe’s hikers and bikers and its spectacularly clear water makes it a diving haven, although don’t expect tropical marvels, it’s the Med after all and the creatures under the sea here are a little on the dull side.
Pretty hill towns, leaning towers, prison islands and Renaissance art worth more than Ireland’s national debt make Tuscany beloved among the well-heeled, but a villa in Chiantishire is the real dream. In the absence of a Lotto win, owning one is beyond my reach. Even renting one isn’t cheap. It is, however, fabulous.
There can be few better places to stay than in one of the villas owned by Christopher Bielenberg, the owner of of Sandbrook House in Co Carlow. Bielenberg’s mother Christabel was a scion of the Rothermere newspaper clan and much to the chagrin of her parents, she married a German called Peter in the 1930s. Her husband, a fervent ant-Nazi, was subsequently implicated in a plot to kill Hitler and imprisoned until his indomitable wife persuaded the Gestapo to free him, after which the family fled, ending up in Carlow.
Today the Bielenbergs spend their days moving between Ireland, Britain and Tuscany, where they own three villas in the town of Campligia di Maritimo, about 90 minutes drive from Pisa airport.
The villa we visit has a lovely, lived-in charm and feels instantly like home, albeit one I’ll never be able to afford. Olive oil from nearby groves is left for guests to enjoy, bottles of wine and wood are stacked up in the kitchen and the cutlery and crockery is made up of beautiful odds and ends collected by the family over many years, not just bought in Ikea. There is a huge open fire and an eclectic mix of art on the whitewashed walls.
The house is enormous and could comfortably sleep two families of five or a party of 12 adults. Effectively it is two properties bolted together and comes with four bathrooms, six bedrooms, two kitchens and two living rooms. The views from the half dozen balconies are breathtaking, while the wild flowers growing in the pleasingly unkempt gardens are beautifully sweet smelling. Depending on the seasons, there’s also wild asparagus, salad leaves and mushrooms growing in the garden, which guests are welcome to eat.
Once you’re settled, there will be a real temptation to stock up on food and wine and stay put. Give in to it. Venturina a 15-minute drive away, has good supermarkets, while wine is on tap in the town’s Acquavite wine store at just €1.80 a litre. The Bielenbergs helpfully leave a five-litre container in the villa’s kitchen which you can bring to the wine shop for filling up before decanting it into bottles left next to the kitchen sink.
If you get restless, the nearest town is a 20-minute walk away. Be warned, however, it makes Suvereto look like Las Vegas and is more comatose than sleepy. Siena, Florence, Lucca and the rest of the Tuscan hill towns are also within easy reach, as are some surprisingly beautiful beaches.
And beach access is important as the villa doesn’t have a pool. The ones nearby are okay, but at the height of summer they get very crowded and Italian beachgoers have a seriously underdeveloped sense of personal space. A better option is to drive further south, where miles of white sandy beaches hide behind pine forests.
But, ultimately, the lure of the sands is fleeting when there is great food to be had, amazing wine to be drunk and rolling hills to be stared longingly at from the dream retreat. Like all dreams, this one won’t endure but it will be great while it lasts.
Book a villa ...
The Bielenberg villas can be booked at sandbrook.ie/villas/ and prices per week are €2,510 in low season, €2,880 in mid-season and €3,380 in high season. Low season runs from January 7th to March 30th; April 14th to May 4th and October 6th to December 21st. Mid-season goes from March 31st to April 13th, May 5th to June 29th; September 1st to October 5th and December 22nd to January 4th. High season runs from June 30th until August 31st.
Ryanair flies direct from Dublin to Pisa on Thursdays, Saturdays and Tuesdays, see ryanair.com.