TEEOFFINTUSCANY!
Golfers will love this top course set amid Italy’s dreamy scenery, says Adam Ruck
MARY keeps asking for a day on the beach,’ said my playing partner Jim, wiping the sand off his shoes between bunker visits at Royal Golf La Bagnaia. ‘I feel like I’ve visited every beach in Italy this afternoon.’
Among the olive groves and vineyards of rural Tuscany, Jim was having one of those days.
A round of golf reveals a bit about a man, and I soon learned that Jim keeps smiling and counting through adversity, and always stays with Hilton when he’s on the road.
You know what you’re getting: reliable service and loyalty benefits, he tells me.
Back home in Kentucky he entered one of Hilton’s prize draws because the headline prize, a weekend at Bagnaia’s luxurious spa hotel, coincided with his wife Mary’s 60th birthday. And guess what, he won!
The fact that her birthday destination has one of the best golf courses in Italy was something Jim may have forgotten to mention when he gave Mary the news. Having come all this way, they made a big trip of it: shopping in Milan, gondolas in Venice, golf and spa in Tuscany.
Bagnaia might not fit your idea of a Hilton. At the top of a typically Tuscan avenue of cypresses, it has kept the look of the old hill village it used to be, before one of Italy’s richest families acquired and transformed it into a hotel village; old stones on the outside, air-con luxury within.
The Buddha Spa is in a secluded spot at the foot of the hill, with treatment rooms and a natural rock pool in the zen garden.
It was the matriarch, Marisa Monti Riffeser, who had the idea of adding golf in 2009 and invited American course designer Robert Trent Jones Jr to one of her glamorous parties.
Jones took a walk, started sketching, and two years later Royal Golf La Bagnaia opened for play.
The club has everything you’d expect from a modern golf resort: palatial clubhouse, vast practice ground, and a course that’s long and tough enough for scratch players, yet accessible to hackers such as Jim and me by virtue of its generous fairways and forward tees.
It describes itself as an inland links, which is golfspeak for an absence of trees.
The Tuscan scenery makes up for any number of missed putts and failed bunker escapes.
Lakes add spice to the challenge and collect the water needed for sustainable golf.
AfTeR a hot dry summer that condemned much of central Italy to water rationing, Jim and I found Bagnaia’s fairways lush and resplendent, its greens fast and true. As the club has only 40 members, wear and tear is not an issue.
Golf is an addictive game and those who can’t get enough of it can go round and round again without exhausting the challenge. That would be a pity, with the Buddha Spa to enjoy and Tuscany to explore.
The hotel has a fleet of bicycles and can recommend more or less energetic circuits, including an hour’s hilly ride along country lanes to Siena, where the striped marble cathedral and Palazzo Pubblico rank high on Tuscany’s must-see list.
The only disappointment is not being allowed to pedal flat out around the Piazza del Campo in a two-wheeled version of Siena’s famous horse race, the Palio.
On a four-wheeled excursion, Siena can be twinned with felsina, a family- run winery whose vineyards straddle the boundary between Colli Senesi and Chianti Classico districts.
Beneath the vaults of old farm buildings and centennial cellars, barrels great and small are capped by glass airlocks invented, or so legend has it, by Leonardo da Vinci.
The tasting room will dispel any prejudice about bistro vino Chianti in a straw basket. felsina makes a dinner party wine for every dish, from elegant chardonnay to luscious vin santo, via spumante (white and rose) and a range of noble reds. A slap-up dinner at Bagnaia is my chance to impress Jim and Mary with my newly acquired knowledge. ‘You have to try the vin santo del Chianti Classico with a cantucci biscuit,’ I say.
We raise our glasses to golf’s sweet torment and the more tangible pleasures of life in Italy.