When you have THE PERFECT LOCATION – northern Italy – you want the perfect hotel. And TIM MAGEE found it on the banks of Lake Garda
“Peel a fig for your friend and a peach for your enemies,” Helena Lomazzi says while paring a big bruisey fig for me. I’ve already gorged on a gorgeous vine peach whole but it has me wondering about whether the person who came up with old sayings had a thing about peaches and figs. Both fruit seem friendly enough to me but I thought you weren’t to give a fig, and to eat the peach? Anyway, I’ve absolutely no idea what it means. I’m in a part of Italy that bore Machiavellian back-stabbery, where city states went to war over the recipe for posh luncheon meat – but a skinless peach? It doesn’t sound like much of a threat. Although, like almost anything, it sounds better in Italian.
My Italian is mostly confined to menu-gibber but I was trying to figure out how to say timing is everything. Being fed a perfectly synergistic vine peach under a rusty Tuscan sunset, on the eve of harvest, in a vineyard that works according to the cycle of the moon is laugh-out-loud perfect timing.
Helena was in marketing in Milan before turning off what she calls “the infernet” and running away to the good life in the quaint Colombaia natural winery with her charming husband and third-generation winemaker, Dante. I could have listened to them all evening under their ancient sycamore with the marble table brimming with Colombaia’s quirky wines but no, Dante and Helena had to go andget changed for an alternative version of Figaro in the opera house in Siena that evening. Sure I don’t want their life.
Green-eyed while trying to figure out how much I’d get for my house, car, dog, I retreated back to my suite at nearby Castello di Casole. More Sonoma than Siena, Castello di Casole is a boutique hotel on an estate the size of a small country with Europe’s finest infinity pool. Run by the American Timbers Resorts, the moneyed ski-and-wine-junkie experts, their properties are tiptop and, thankfully, devoid of the unsettling facial gymnastics and Disneyland-type greetings of most luxe stateside chains.
Castello di Casole’s location is as big a strength as its Californian rooms and service. The medieval Manhattan that is San Gimignano, the gap-tooth-walled fortress towns of Montalcino and Montepulciano and Italy’s prettiest square, Piazza del Campo in Siena, are an hour or less away. Mighty Florence is just up the road. This was my fifth trip to Italy in a year and typical Tuscany, Florence and Lake Garda might sound like an ad for Cliché Coach Tours but this time I wanted to take the beaten track.
Although I’d heard a lot of good things about JK Place, the boutique hotel in Florence, their clunky, furniture store-style website kept putting me off. Overlooking the handsome Piazza Santa Maria Novella in the centre of town, their website does this hotel no justice. Run by the doge of concierges, Claudio Meli, I get why JK Place is the best place. It’s him and his people, they all seem to be five star concierges and few other cities need as much guidance as the Tuscan capital. I wasn’t in the hotel five minutes when Angela, one of Claudio’s gentle staff with golden keys on her lapels suggested I leave and go straight to Mario’s Trattoria. For an overnight in Florence, room twelve at JK Place is the place and, if you are only passing through, then super Mario’s is a more important stop than the Uffizi or David.
When I arrived for lunch the manager told me that a strange American had been waiting outside when they opened that morning. This messenger handed them an envelope with $1,000 in it and explained that he’d flown over just for this as his father had bequeathed the money to his favourite restaurant in his will. Cobblers maybe, but compelling cobblers. I wouldn’t have swallowed it except for the maelstrom of Florentines milling into Florentine T-bones and handmade pasta in a long, skinny tiled kitchen like it was their last day on earth. That wasn’t for me apparently – I was wrenched from the party and led downstairs to their VIP section. Behind the red rope in Mario’s means a subterranean storeroom full of bric-a-brac. Not contrived shabby chic, just a storeroom with a couple of tables of lucky diners, jammed full of food, opera and football memorabilia. It was like eating in Pavarotti’s basement.
Modern Florence and Mario’s Trattoria shows that this city isn’t just a living museum, it doesn’t have the theme park feel of Venice. Santo Spirito, which is Italian for Shoreditch, is where the women look like New Yorkers and the guys don’t appear to take longer to get ready than their girlfriends. They don’t have that chilly Milanese snobbery or the southern spivvery. Florence is a reminder that Italy is a relatively new idea and even neighbouring cities have entirely distinct identities. Florence’s real treasures are the Florentines. It’s they that make it perfect. Well nearly. Perfect is just up the road.
The more you travel the harder it is to define what is the best of anything. That’s the whole point. Earlier this year I crossed off the top of my travel to do list, Venice to Paris on the Orient Express. I hadn’t been able to imagine anything more considered, more perfect since. Then I went to Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda. Although seen by many as the best hotel on earth (it’s in my personal international top ten), this 21-room villa doesn’t have the feel of one. It does have the feel of project perfect. Like the landscape that surrounds it, there isn’t a nook or pick of this that could be improved upon, but Villa Feltrinelli is there to be used, and it doesn’t feel like you’re overnighting in a museum.
I can’t pin down the strongest memory from my two-night stay but there are dozens – even for this sometimes jaded traveller: the hundred leaf salad from their gardens (gardens not greenhouse), the Acqua Di Parma in the bathroom, swimming in that exact slice of Lake Garda, the world’s greatest turndown, or simply the overall precision of the design and service and the dozy smiley stupor that the setting and its people smother you in.
I arrived on the back of some comedic Autostrade drama at the end of a five-night trip. After a surprisingly delicious burger – with lemon of all things – I cradled the Kindle for an hour in the sun before having a cosy mosey around their gardens and a not too bracing dip. By the time I got back to my suite, the clothes marked for laundry were laundered, pressed and wrapped in muslin with lavender. The clothes fairy is a throwback to the days of the Grand Tour with compliments of the house, as was the generous mini-bar in the room. Villa Feltrinelli isn’t cheap nor should it be. It should be full of hotel managers from around the world. Villa Feltrinelli is stunning but there are other stunning hotels. It is expensive but there are others as expensive yet less hospitable, less perfect. Not every hotel can do what Villa Feltrinelli do but they can all learn from it. Perfect service isn’t in a book, it’s by the shore at Lake Garda.
Tim Magee @manandasuitcase
This article appeared in a previous issue, for more features like this, don’t miss our March issue, out Saturday March 5.
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