The Pool Is in a Quarry: What Eight Years of Restoration Bought

Most Tuscan pools are a rectangle of blue in a field, photographed in July with a cypress behind it. Ours is under the house, in a room that was cut out of rock five hundred years ago, and you reach it through a passage you would not find on your own.

This is how it got there, and why we did it that way.

The room was already there

The building is 16th century. Underneath it, as under a lot of old buildings in a hill town, there is a cellar that was originally a quarry — the stone came out of the ground here and the house went up on top of it. For most of its life that space held barrels, then nothing, then the kind of objects that end up in a cellar over four hundred years.

The obvious thing would have been to fill it in and put a pool in the garden. We did the opposite, and it took the better part of eight years of restoration to finish the house around that decision.

What it is now

A private heated pool in a five-hundred-year-old quarry, closer to a Roman bath than to a swimming pool. The floor is Sienese travertine, so you walk on stone rather than on tile. There is a whirlpool — and the honest warning is that it is difficult to get out of it.

In the second part of the cellar there is a hot rain shower in the middle of a brick room, set low enough that you can sit under it. That was not in any plan. It happened because the room asked for it once the bricks were cleaned.

The whole thing is reached through a passage from inside the house, and it is accessible only to the guests staying here — there is no other apartment, no reception, nobody else in the building.

Why indoors is the point, not the compromise

People assume an indoor pool is what you build when you cannot have an outdoor one. In Tuscany it is the other way round.

An outdoor pool works in July and August — which is exactly when the cities are at their worst, the queues longest and the heat least forgiving. A heated pool inside a stone room works in November, February and April, which is when Florence, Pisa and Lucca are actually pleasant. It turns the shoulder seasons from a compromise into the best time to come.

It also changes the shape of a day. You spend the morning in a city, you are home by early afternoon, and instead of a queue you have a swim. That is the whole argument for choosing a base inside an hour of everything.

The rest of the house, briefly

Two hundred and thirty square metres, open plan, in a building whose bricks were all brought back to the surface during the restoration rather than covered over. A terrace you reach from both the master bedroom and the living room. From the windows you can see Leonardo da Vinci's house on the opposite hill.

Two bedrooms, four guests at most, and for the length of your stay the whole building is yours.

A note on restoration

Eight years is a long time to spend on one building, and the reason is that almost nothing was replaced with something newer. The vintage and unique elements that survived are the ones that make the house what it is, and they are also the ones that cannot be ordered again. We ask guests to treat them with a bit of care, and most people do — they tend to be the reason they booked.

Umamma is a whole 16th-century house in San Miniato, between Florence and Pisa: two bedrooms, up to four guests, a private heated indoor pool, a winter garden, and parking in the square at the door. From 900 euro per night, three nights minimum. Booking direct is always the lowest rate — no platform fees are added. Check the dates.