Hilltop castle is a feast for the eyes
Discover Tuscany’s lesser-travelled road at Castello di Vicarello
MAREMMA, ITALY— Like a pointer finger, a rainbow as thick as a column illuminates the sky above Castello di Vicarello. If I had any doubts at all, that’s when I know for sure that this 12th century restored (and reborn) fortress on a hill in the Maremma is a magical place. “It’s really not a hotel at all — it’s a home,” says Aurora Baccheschi Berti, owner, cookbook author, winemaker, and former fashion industry maven, as we unload our suitcases from the car.
We walk through an arched entry way and into a garden ablaze with golden light. An expanse of rosemary bushes, busy with dancing butterflies, draws our eyes. And beyond, a panorama, thick with vineyards, stately Italian pines and elegant olive groves, swirls into view. New spring flowers, sweet and edible, perfume the air. A whiff of cigar smoke adds clouds of contrast. And, whispered snippets of dramatic Italian conversation spill from an open window. Riveted, we stop in our tracks, all senses alert. This is the Italy we’ve been waiting for.
Berti bought the hilltop property, located in this remote, lesser-travelled portion of Tuscany on a whim more than 30 years ago. It was a ruin with crumbling walls, a collapsed roof and an abandoned chapel. The garden teemed with weeds and cacti. Wild animals inhabited the dilapidated staterooms. Still, Berti says: “I had to have it.” She saw it had soul — and she never looked back.
These days, Castello di Vicarello is not only the home she shares with winemaking husband Carlo Baccheschi Berti and their three sons; it’s one of world’s hidden luxury hotel gems. With just seven rooms, the hotel is a complex that fuses old and new. Modern elements, like glass and metal, merge with ancient stone, original terra cotta roof tiles, and rough hewn chestnut beams. White washed walls make a perfect palette for modern art, Italian antiques, and mindfully collected Indonesian keepsakes and Balinese furniture from the family’s time spent abroad. Collectibles, many that evoke the spirit of rustic Italian country life — taxidermy, vintage hats, imperfect copper pots — casually adorn common rooms. A separate small architecturally integrated spa hovers on a hill over the vineyards, offering Ayurvedic treatments and custom yoga classes. Two freshwater swimming pools, ringed by gardens, pose a way to cool off on hot summer Tuscan afternoons.
Indeed, many things set Castello di Vicarello apart. Most pointedly, though, its how time stands still here — in an enchanted, Alice in Wonderland, Fellini’s Dolce Vita kind of way. Some days we do nothing but sit on a roughhewn bench in the piazza of an interior garden and meditate on life, perfectly content. Even my teenagers sense the gravitas of the fecund silence, the profundity of the place. “This is my favourite hotel in the world,” says my 17-year old son, gazing out the Gothicshaped window in our room to watch the sun set over the vineyards. “I want to stay forever,” says my daughter, wandering through the herb garden and guessing what Berti will make us for supper.
And that’s another reason to come here: Berti, her farm-to-table cookery and her storybook kitchen. To eat at Castello di Vicarello is to chew and digest the landscape. The author of the recently released My Tuscan Kitchen, Berti learned to cook Maremmastyle when the family moved into the castle more than a decade ago. Tutored by locals who shared their family recipes, Berti studied the area’s cuisine hands-on, in her own kitchen. Redolent with terroir, this is seasonally prepared food that hails from the earth. Think: foraged mushrooms, garden-grown eggplant, wild boar meat, and home pressed olive oil. And then there’s the wine. Carlo Baccheschi Berti, one of Italy’s most revered winemakers, awakened — and made lucrative — the slumbering vineyards that surround the property. A serious wine master, his red blends explode with leather, tobacco, messy raspberry from the bush and long, ending feathers of dark chocolate.
Perhaps the highlight of our stay is the long afternoon we pass in Berti’s immense kitchen learning to cook. In this gourmand’s sanctuary, with its Gothic vaulted ceiling, hanging pots, piles of just-picked herbs and baskets of freshly gathered eggs, we craft fat ribbons of pappardelle pasta (only my son manages to knead the dough to Berti’s standards), make perfect pots of risotto (my daughter is quite good at stirring), assemble savoury tarts and crush handfuls of hazelnuts together with chocolate for the hotel’s signature dessert. Its hard work, but Berti makes it look easy. Emboldened by stolen sips of wine, even I feel like an Italian chef.
Guests who check into this far flung corner of Tuscany can use it as a base for day trips to such places as nearby Siena, Florence — or, even Rome.
Go to vicarello.it for more information.