The fun family villa break for frazzled mums
AT SOME point during our journey, it occurs to me that holidaying with two boys under two, a husband who will have to abandon us after a couple of days for a business meeting, a sleep-deprived couple with a 12-week-old baby and one bouncy bachelor is not wise. Rome airport does not help. It is dirty, cramped and hot. The car hire area is awash with irate parents, screaming children and lashings of eau d’armpit. Then an accidental circuit of the entire Rome ring road does not add to our general joie de vivre.
But if anything can soothe frazzled nerves, it is the sweeping lawns, cool interiors and extraordinary calm of Villa La Scorticata. Villa specialist CV Travel offers some splendid properties. But this one — an 18th-century farmhouse in Lazio — is glorious.
It’s awash with pale greens, creams and soft yellows. None of these are colours you would ever think of putting together — and yet they are so pleasing to the eye, we all want to rush home and start redecorating.
Outside, we find lawns, roses, fig trees drooping with fat weeping fruit, a discreet swimming pool.
All of it is utterly and splendidly isolated, in a clearing on top of a hill, up a long rutted track and through a 250hectare forest (a bit Blair Witch Project at night). The owners have even left us firm instructions to shut the gate, to keep the wild boar out of the swimming pool.
LAzIO, which borders Tuscany and Umbria in the north and Campania in the south, isn’t a trendy part of Italy. Sting doesn’t have a villa here. What you do see is real Italians hanging out their washing, drinking amazingly good cappuccinos outside petrol stations, doing their weekly shop and commuting to work in the medieval city of Viterbo. Possibly even popping to the thermal springs at Terme dei Papi for a dip on their way home.
There’s much to do, too; a relief, because a baby-heavy week in a villa needs breaking up with the odd outing to prevent cabin fever. For one member of our party, a daily trip to the spectacular cheese counter at the supermarket in Cura di Vetralla is enough to keep him happy. Never has one man bought and consumed so much burrata —a delicious combination of mozzarella and cream that means ‘buttery’ in Italian.
By his third visit, the manager is rushing out to greet him, and buyers are dispatched far and wide to find richer, creamier burratas.
For those who are more cultural-minded, Rome is an easy possibility, just 60 miles away, But if, like us, you can’t face the ring road again — even for a glimpse of Pope Francis and a quick pizza — then the fortified hilltop town of Tarquinia is a great alternative.
Only 30 miles away, and a hop and a skip from beaches and endless gelaterias, it’s also reputedly Italy’s oldest city, founded by the Estruscans in the 12th-century BC.
It is largely unspoilt by tourism, and boasts the most magnificent necropolis imaginable. Here, more than 6,000 graves are cut into the limestone, at least 200 of them painted with jaunty scenes — supposedly to make the dead feel at home when, as was firmly believed, they awoke in the afterlife.
Vast banquets, naked servants, sexually explicit acts and extraordinary revelry — they give more than a taste of the Estruscans’ brilliantly naughty lifestyle.
In contrast, our own revelries at Villa La Scorticata seem a little tame — though I doubt even the Estruscans could have challenged us over the consumption of burrata mozzarella.