One couple’s luxuriating trip to Italy
Ivo Dawnay and wife Rachel Johnson zip from Rome to sleepy Umbria and Lake Como – but not without some serious pampering along the way ... with a flashy car for him and endless spas for her
I’m lying on a deck alongside the azure waters of Lake Como, with steaks sizzling on the barbecue and a glass of Montepulciano in my hand, yet I find myself curiously unrelaxed. I am pining for the open road.
Let me explain. When it comes to holidays, my wife Rachel likes what she calls ‘activities’ – pampering, languid physical exercise from swimming to walking, all marinated in a stew of gossip provided by old friends. Me? I prefer a smattering of culture, long lunches, even longer siestas (snoreathons, says Rachel) and burning rubber across hitherto unvisited landscapes.
So when the prospect of our annual visit to the family villa in Greece reared its head, I finally put my foot down. ‘This year,’ I ventured, ‘why not a tour of our friends’ holiday hangouts in Italy, punctuated by a trip to two of its finest spas?’
In my mind, it was going to be like a road movie. You know, the ones where a couple set off on a massive drive across deserts and mountains, on endless black-top roads that fade into the horizon, always just one step ahead of the Feds.
I was proposing a European variant of that: a modern Grand Tour, perhaps – no Feds, but nice hotels, and, best of all, a snarling, cream and red, leatherupholstered Mercedes S500 Cabriolet in place of the traditional Mustang. So spas and cars it was.
We started as we meant to go on with a stay in the extravagant Rome Cavalieri hotel, perched on Monte Mario and with a 270-degree view of the Eternal City.
To the right was the dome of St Peter’s, ahead the Castello Sant’Angelo, where Tosca leapt to her death, and there, panning left, the outline of the Colosseum and the church atop the Spanish Steps. It was a perfect airy retreat from the crowds in the stuffy, overheated city below.
Inside, the Cavalieri was almost as spectacular. It was as if an acquisitive sheik had mated the Dolce Vita with Louis XIV’s Versailles. You might call it 1960s baroque: a huge, modernist reception hall redecorated with spectacular 18th Century decorative art, classical pictures of all descriptions, topped by three museum-quality Tiepolos.
The art-collector owners have kitted out their palace with what must be one of the greatest sets of fixtures and fittings known to the hospitality industry, even down to Rudolf Nureyev’s costumes. And if classical art is not your thing, do as Leonardo DiCaprio does when he takes the apartment-sized penthouse suite and drown in Karl Lagerfeld’s monster sofa and admire the walls festooned with Warhols – the room is a snip at something like €6,900 a night.
Meanwhile, the hotel’s top restaurant, La Pergola, has been feted by foodies as the best in all Italy.
If the Cavalieri was gobsmacking, our transport hardly felt out of place. Next morning, after tennis on a Davis Cup-quality court shaded by cypress trees, we find the car. It is lurking like a sulky athlete at the end of the parcheggio – a deep red fruits-of-the-forest soft top over a muscular café-creme body, with a dashboard like a jumbo jet and a user’s manual to match.
The dashboard has enough buttons and gizmos to please a 747 pilot. Most of them we never understood or used. But the real proof of this motor- ised pudding was on the autostrade. As we rolled out of the jostling Roman traffic towards Umbria, the beast snarled and fidgeted until the road opened up – then coughed fruitily and roared. As if in a time machine, the sun-soaked hill towns and languid curves of the A1 began zipping past as the G-forces of acceleration forced us deeper into the back of our calf-leather seats.
Ahhh, the real Italy at last. Eat your heart out, Monument Valley. Take that, Thelma and Louise. The next two weeks were a festival of German engineering and Mediterranean languor: hurtling along motorways, then gliding up hairpins into sleepy, sunsoaked hill towns. In shady cafés, there were no ‘have a nice days’ from sassily efficient waitresses, but caramel-thick coffees served in their own leisurely time by frumpy women in black.
Beyond dazzling streets, there were cool, dark church interiors, perfumed
with incense and torrid with bleeding crucifixes, chirruping gaggles of nuns, and, of course, the traditional red-faced and peeling English tourists with whiny children, out in the midday sun.
Under cerulean skies, populous Lazio slid into tranquil Umbria – first, Orvietto, then Todi, and on to Perugia – before we cruised up the stunning Sibillini mountains of Le Marche. The US road-trip equivalent would be exiting the New Jersey Turnpike towards the Appalachians of West Virginia – minus, of course, the lurking sheriff and 90kph speed limits.
Being restless types, Rachel and I devised the trip as an alternative to the two-week villa holiday, which always threatens to drag into Uncle Vanya-like tedium with the company and spats about the washing-up.
Instead, in addition to the stays at the Rome Cavalieri and two exquisite and historic spa hotels in Tuscany, we would zigzag ruthlessly between our friends’ holiday homes, with brief intermissions to pick up fresh shower gel and shampoo in spotless hotel bathrooms. The Bagni di Pisa was our first proper spa-stop. A mile or two from the Leaning Tower, this former home of the Grand Duke of Tuscany was, on first appearance, a magnificent, frescoed 18th Century palace with airy rooms and a wonderful restaurant. But in its inner recesses lay a veritable array of water-based treatments. As a believer only in the threeminute shower, I escaped in the car after a brief dip in a honeymooner’s grotto pool. Rachel delved deeper, however. When I returned, she reported that she had been swathed in linen, then squirted with boiling hot mud, before being wrapped like a chrysalis in Egyptian cotton. Each to her own, I suppose. She certainly looked thinner and happier. ‘I feel wonderful,’ she said. This was a mere hors d’oeuvre, however, to the delights of the Bagni’s sister hotel – the Grotta Giusti, just an hour’s drive away towards Florence. This 19th Century poet’s villa, nestled under the Luccan hills, is all the more surprising for being reached through a nondescript suburb.
Once there, however, it is easy to understand why everyone from the composer Giuseppe Verdi to the revolutionary Garibaldi made the trip. Beneath what appears a comfortable four-star hotel lurks a cavernous secret that owes more to Italy’s national poet, Dante Alighieri. Indeed, the grotti – okay, caves – are truly astonishing: a wonderland of tunnels and soaring caverns, through which one trips in slippers and dressing-gown amid signs demanding silence. As the visitor delves deeper from paradiso, through purgatorio to inferno – the hottest of all where the rocky walls drip with sweat – even spa-sceptics like me could not help but be impressed.
With Rachel fully sated, it was time to get back on the road. After a glorious drive up the Ligurian coast, we ended with a sublime week on Lake Como – long on activities… but short on driving.
So what is the case for the roadtrip holiday? Its prime advantage is clearly variety. No danger of outstaying one’s welcome. That is a plus for hosts too, who might love to see you for a night or four, but would quail at a full week of your delightful company.
For us, it was the compromise between my Jack Spratt love of the open road, and Mrs Spratt’s desire for the mumbo-jumbo world of ‘wellness’. How ironic, then, that it was only on our way to Milan’s Linate airport after completing almost 1,000 miles that I found the massage programme for the car.
By pressing a button or two, I discovered I could deliver a variety of electronic lumbar pulses through the seat. We fumbled through the War And Peace-size handbook and found that there were almost as many massage programmes as we could have tried at the spa hotels over the previous fortnight.
It took the man from Mercedes, waiting for us at Departures, to know how to turn it off.