Tuscany house rentals - La Capannina - Holiday house with pool southeast of Siena, Tuscany, Italy.
The property's location makes excursions to Siena, Assisi, Orvieto, Perugia, Arezzo and Florence an easy day trip. But the area below Siena, stretching from the monastery of Monte Oliveto to Montalcino and Montepulciano offers some rewarding sites that are well worth a visit too.
In San Quirico d'Orcia make sure you see the Horti Leonini, an early Renaissance garden, as well as the western door in the city wall and the Collegiata (main church). Montalcino is beautifully situated on a hill inhabited since Etruscan times, swathed in vineyards and olive groves. It is a quiet, affluent, attractive town with pretty buildings and flower-filled squares, and many shops selling Brunello di Montalcino wine. Montepulcino is a graceful Tuscan hill town, best known for its Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, which was being praised by connoisseurs over 200 years ago and contends with Italy's best today. Pienza, the unfinished 'Utopian' city, was commissioned by Pope Pius II in 1459. And check out Chiusi: unpretentious and lively, compared to Montepulciano it is uncontaminated by tourism. Chiusi has a railway station from which it is a quick ride to the city centre of Rome.
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Monticchiello is a pleasant walled village, whose crooked watch-tower is visible from afar. Next to the church is a small shop which sells local linens (towels, bedspreads) and materials in pure linen. They use traditional methods and patterns and the results are extremely attractive. Visit the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore and the semi-derelict monastery of Sant'Anna in Camprena - a romantic setting which served as location for the film The English Patient. Sant'Antimo is surely one of the loveliest Romanesque buildings in all of Italy. It is hard to imagine a more sympathetic combination of architectural grace and natural setting.
And last but not least the landscape in this region of Tuscany is spectacular. The Crete Senesi are eroded clay hills in the Orcia valley; these strange, pale, barren slopes, with their bare cliffs, broken gullies and white Jurassic limestone, look more lunar than terrestrial.
Tuscany is also famous for its hot springs, belonging to a geothermal system that encircles Monte Amiata, the most spectacular being Saturnia in the south west of the region. Steaming water collects in a number of white limestone basins - a rare natural spectacle and great fun to bathe in. Swimming is possible both in the natural basins and in smart thermal baths. Saturnia offers a wide range of comforts and even a sauna. Close to the property is Bagno Vignoni which has been popular since Etruscan times. St Catherine of Siena is said to have appreciated its therapeutic qualities, as is Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose family built the splendid arcaded pool - a kind of flooded, bubbling piazza, famously used by Tarkovsky for some of the more surreal passages of his film Nostalgia.
Not far from this antique piazza is a hotel with a lovely open air swimming pool, fed from hot springs. This is also available to external guests. Bagni San Filippo may be the world's smallest thermal spa - a telephone booth, a few old houses, an outdoor spring in the middle of the woods with glistening limestone formations and one small hotel with a public pool. The Montepulciano thermal springs can also be enjoyed in an indoor thermal swimming pool. Have yourself thoroughly pampered.
Find out more about rental of this idyllic holiday base in Tuscany: click below.
