A Perfect Day in the Val d'Orcia
6 min readWritten by the house
One unhurried day, written the way we would actually spend it: two villages, one long lunch, and the walk that everybody photographs.
Guests often arrive with a list of eight places and leave wishing they had seen three properly. The Val d'Orcia is small on a map and slow in practice, because every road is a series of curves along a ridge and every curve is a reason to stop. This is the day we suggest when somebody asks how to spend their first full morning here.
Start with breakfast at eight under the pergola, then drive the twenty minutes to Pienza before the coaches arrive. The town is barely three streets deep, built in five years in the fifteenth century by a pope who wanted a perfect place to be from. Walk the wall path on the south side first, where the whole valley opens up beneath you, then double back through the middle for pecorino. The cheese shops will let you taste before you buy, and the aged one wrapped in walnut leaves is worth the extra euros.
The valley rewards a slow day far more than an efficient one.
By eleven the light gets hard and flat, which is the right time to be indoors. Bagno Vignoni is fifteen minutes back towards us, and its main square is not a square at all but a steaming stone pool built by the Medici. You cannot swim in that one, but the terraced pools below the village are free and open, and shallow enough to sit in with your trousers rolled up.
Lunch should be long. We book guests into a family place outside San Quirico where the menu is read aloud rather than printed, and where the pici, a fat hand-rolled pasta the region invented, comes with garlic and breadcrumbs and nothing else. Order the house red in a jug. It costs about the same as water and is considerably better.
Come back to the villa for the middle of the afternoon, because so does everybody who lives here. Swim, sleep, read on the terrace. Then at half past six, when the sun drops below the ridge line, walk up through the olive grove to the top of our land. That is the view people mean when they talk about Tuscany: cypress trees along a white road, hills going soft and blue behind each other, and about twenty minutes of light so warm it looks invented. Bring a glass. We will not mind.
Come and see it for yourself
Four rooms, breakfast under the pergola and the whole of the Val d’Orcia outside the gate. Tell us your dates and we will tell you what is open.
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