A PRIVATE VILLA IN TUSCANY

There are two ways to rent well in Tuscany, and both of them have a flaw.

You can take a villa in the countryside. It is beautiful, it is private, and every single dinner becomes a thirty-minute drive down an unlit white road — which means one of you is not drinking, and both of you are back in the car at eleven at night. Or you can take an apartment in a city: you can walk everywhere, and you spend the week sharing a wall, a lift and a breakfast room with strangers.

Umamma is the third option, and it exists because it is what we wanted ourselves.

​

THE WHOLE PLACE IS YOURS

This is not a room, a suite or a wing. It is a 16th-century building in a hill town, 230 square metres, and for the length of your stay it belongs to you entirely. No reception, no shared pool, no other guests, no host in the flat downstairs.

The pool is the clearest expression of this. It is indoors, heated, and built into the basement of a building that has stood here for five hundred years. It is not shared with anybody, and nobody can see in. There is no opening time and no closing time.

The terrace works the same way. It is yours alone, it is not overlooked, and nobody can see you on it — which, on a hill in the middle of Tuscany, is rarer than it sounds.

And you park directly in front of the door. In a medieval hill town that is close to unheard of: most places in a historic centre mean leaving the car in a public lot and walking your luggage up through the streets. Here you pull up, unload, and you are home.

​

AND YET YOU CAN WALK TO DINNER

Here is the part  the countryside villa cannot offer. You are in a town.

San Miniato is a real medieval hill town on the Via Francigena, with a Frederick II tower at the top, white truffle country underneath it, and a life that does not depend on tourists. There are restaurants a few minutes' walk away where the people at the next table live here.

So you keep your privacy all day and still eat properly at night, on foot, and walk home. Nobody drives. Nobody has to be the sober one.

That is what we mean by authentic. Not shared, not inconvenient, not performed for visitors. A real place, entered on your own terms.

​

EVERYTHING WITHIN AN EASY DRIVE

You will have a car, and everything worth seeing is close enough to leave after breakfast and be back for a swim. Florence is 35 km and about 35 minutes. Pisa is 32 km and about 25 minutes. Lucca is 35 km and about 35 minutes. San Gimignano is 40 km and about 40 minutes. Volterra is visible from the top of our hill on a clear day.

Siena is the only one that costs you a full day rather than a morning. We would rather tell you now than have you discover it on a Tuesday.

There is also a station at the bottom of the hill, on the Florence to Pisa line, with direct trains to both cities in under half an hour. Almost nobody uses it — but on the one day you would rather not deal with Florence's restricted traffic zone, it is there.