Tuscany, Italy

Poggio Piglia

Price per night from$219.52

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR202.91), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

Cultured contemporary casale

Setting

Charming Chiusi

Poggio Piglia hotel in Tuscany has a brilliant name, enviable art and bucolic charm by the barrel-load: wine and olive oil are produced on site, and rooms survey some of Italy’s finest scenery. There’s a bright and airy restaurant with Kartell Ghost chairs and memorable views, and a glittering infinity pool set in herb-scented gardens.

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

Welcome drink on arrival and a bottle of wine in your room; GoldSmiths get a bottle of the hotel’s olive oil instead of the wine

Facilities

Photos Poggio Piglia facilities

Need to know

Rooms

Nine.

Check–Out

By 10.30am. Earliest check-in, 2pm.

Prices

Double rooms from £191.26 (€223), including tax at 10 per cent. Please note the hotel charges an additional local city tax of €1.00 per person per night on check-out.

More details

Rates usually include buffet breakfast.

At the hotel

Free WiFi in communal areas. In rooms: flatscreen TV, minibar and Be One bath products.

Our favourite rooms

We lost our heart to the one-bedroom Independent Villa, which occupies its own little patch of hotel grounds, flanked by olive trees and overlooking the Tuscan countryside. Because the villa is set apart from the main building, bedding down here feels romantic and private. That said, the Deluxe Rooms have nut-brown parquet floors, wooden-beamed ceilings and sweeping views…

Poolside

There’s a beautiful infinity pool set in the herb-packed gardens.

Packing tips

Leave space in your suitcase for bottles of the hotel’s own olive oil and wine, but don’t forget your bottle opener and picnic rug.

Also

There’s no lift, but staff will deliver your luggage upstairs if needed.

Children

The hotel has a very grown-up feel, but well-behaved little Smiths are welcome. Babysitting can be arranged. There’s no children’s menu, but the chef is happy to adapt his dishes for younger palates (pasta with tomato sauce, for example).

Food and Drink

Photos Poggio Piglia food and drink

Top Table

Out on the terrace, with the breeze on your skin. On cooler days, you can sit indoors but admire what’s outside, thanks to the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

Dress Code

Relaxed refinement, just like the hotel: a splash of silk in olive and gold hues; cashmere; cologne.

Hotel restaurant

Chef Jacopo Dionisi rustles up elegant Italian dishes in the cream-and-white restaurant: expect a menu that hops from the traditional to the playful: tagliata of Chianina beef, or pork fillet cooked with raspberries and truffles, for example. Order a bottle or two of Poggio Piglia’s garnet-red wine, made from Sangiovese grapes.

Hotel bar

Get to know the hotel’s grapes with a wine tasting at the informal bar area, just by the restaurant. Enjoy your tipple out on the terrace, in the gardens or on one of the cosy sofas dotted around the communal spaces downstairs.

Last orders

Breakfast is from 8am until 10am; lunch by the pool is from 12pm to 6pm (on request in low season). Dinner is served between 7pm and 8.45pm; reservation required.

Room service

None, so make the most of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Staff will happily point you in the direction of the nearest food store or restaurant…

Location

Photos Poggio Piglia location
Address
Poggio Piglia
Macciano
Chiusi
53043
Italy

Poggio Piglia sits conveniently between Siena and Assisi: Macciano is the closest town. The hotel feels deliciously remote and peaceful, set in its own quiet grounds, tucked away from the main road.

Planes

Florence's main airport, Peretola (aka Amerigo Vespucci; www.aeroporto.firenze.it) is 120km away. Rome’s airport, Leonardo da Vinci (Fiumicino; www.rome-airport.info), is 200km away. Most international carriers fly here, including Alitalia, British Airways and easyJet.

Trains

Chiusi station is a 10-minute drive from Poggio Piglia, with services connecting to Rome, Arezzo, Florence and other key Italian cities (www.trenitalia.com).

Automobiles

It’s a great idea to bring wheels: driving in Tuscany is a pleasure, and gives you easy access to all that you’ll want to visit nearby – verdant vineyards, hilltop towns, rustic trattoria – as well as making day trips to Rome or Florence easy-peasy. From the Mi-Roma A1, take the the Chiusi Chianciano Terme exit onto the SP146. Turn left at the first crossroads toward Chianciano. After 2km, you will find a petrol pump on your left; keep on going for 200m and on your right, you will find the country lane that leads to Poggio Piglia.

Worth getting out of bed for

Go roaming around the gardens, admiring the olive trees (there are more than 900), where five types of olive flourish: Frantoio, Moraiolo, Correggiola, Leccino and Pendolino. Ask staff to give you a tutorial or guided tour, if you want to learn more about the production process (or just make a note to dip bread in a glug or two, in the restaurant). At the hotel, chef-led cooking classes will teach you how to make Italian-inspired fare, and of course you get to indulge in your creations after. Further afield, there’s plenty to keep you busy. Head to Florence, Siena, Pisa or Arezzo for mediaeval splendour and Chianti countryside. Montepulciano, Cortona, Pienza and Chiusi are an hour’s drive away. Visit wineries (start with Avignosi or Contucci), go on a balloon ride in Siena or have a canoeing or kayaking adventure in Lago Trasimeno (staff can arrange any of the activities mentioned above).

Local restaurants

Wood-panelled walls, arched brick ceiling, crisp white linen and candelight: La Solita Zuppa (+39 0578 21006; www.lasolitazuppa.it) on Via Porsenna in Chiusi is a romantic setting for antipasti, pinci and Chianti. The osteria sticks to the traditional dishes of the region – minus some of the duck fat – aiming for modern but authentic Tuscan cuisine. Osteria del Teatro (+39 0575 630556; www.osteria-del-teatro.it) on Via Maffei in Cortona, Arezzo, has a dining room that dates back 500 years, a cosy feel and an intriguing menu: try chicory-and-ricotta-stuffed pasta, gnocchi with duck and rosemary, or artichoke risotto. There are some wildcards too: pork fillets with coffee and apple, or pigeon with black cherries, for example. If you like the idea of eating in a mediaeval convent’s former prison, head to La Frateria di Padre Eligio (+39 0578 238261; www.lafrateria.com) at Convento di San Francesco Cetona in Chiusi. The menu is hand-written, bread is baked daily, the olive oil is milled using old millstones – basically, it’s all pretty darn authentic.

Reviews

Photos Poggio Piglia reviews
Ruth Crilly

Anonymous review

By Ruth Crilly, A model arbiter

The view from our room at Poggio Piglia is the kind of view that makes you incapable of thinking in anything other than clichés. It’s just perfect. Rolling Tuscan hills, green and lush, the scenery looking as though it hasn’t changed since the Romans trod their way across, laying roads and being annoyingly industrious in a way that will put future historical eras to shame.

‘I feel like Ridley Scott’s Gladiator,’ says Mr Smith. ‘Apart from the fact that I’m not a father to a murdered son or a husband to a murdered wife.’ Ignoring the other glaring differences, I leave Mr Smith to unpack his sandals, shield and harpoon and take a little tour around our room, poking into drawers and cantering around the gargantuan bathroom with its two-person soaking tub and what could only be described as a ‘party’ shower. Everything is impeccably styled – the old wooden beams and thick stone walls feel elegant rather than rustic; the neutral colour palette and the simple, stark lines of the furniture make it feel as though you could be in a brand new room, rather than one that has sat in the hotel’s solid, fortress-like building for hundreds of years.

A long, greenery-flanked gravel road unfurls its way up to the elegant Tuscan casale. This is a place with grown-up charm: staff are thin on the ground (pleasingly so) and effortlessly efficient; bold contemporary art decorates rooms; there’s an airy little style-conscious restaurant with Philippe Starck furniture, and green, green gardens planted with fragrant herbs and wild flowers. Our room has its own private entrance and exterior stone staircase and I find Mr Smith, aka Maximus Decimus Meridius, poised and alert at the top of the steps, scanning the landscape as though on the lookout for approaching danger. Beneath us, the acres of hotel-owned vineyards and olive trees look tempting for a leisurely amble, but in the heat of the afternoon it is the cool, mirrored surface of the infinity pool that calls to us the loudest and so we don the appropriate attire and make our way down to claim a pair of sunloungers.

Shamefully, it is here that we spend much of the following 24 hours, breaking only for a fine and jolly multi-coursed dinner in the restaurant and the kind of heavy, dreamless sleep session that can only be achieved after generous helpings of full-bodied Chianti. Finally, guilt-ridden that we are snoozing and sun-lounging away our time in Tuscany, we decide that we must move from Poggio Piglia and have some kind of adventure.

‘Where to?’ says Mr Smith.
‘Oh,’ I say from beneath the cool flannel I have placed over my face, ‘I don’t know. You decide.’
Which is how I find myself, pale and distinctly nauseous, standing beside something called a ‘Judas Cradle’ (look it up) at the Museo Delle Torture in Montepulciano – yup, you got it, the Torture Museum. The hilltop town of Montepulciano is one of those ancient, narrow-streeted places that has you taking a photograph every three seconds and saying things like ‘Cathy/Auntie Beatrice/Dave and Karen would love it here’; yet Mr Smith is happy to spend over an hour examining various spiky mediaeval poles and chained implements, pressing his face to the glass display cabinets with a kind of horrified glee.
‘I find it absolutely fascinating,’ he says, and then, seemingly unaware of my near-to-vomiting status, suggests that we go and get ourselves some dinner.

To my surprise, he has pre-Googled places to eat near Montepulciano and we head towards the restaurant that rates number one in all of the listings, an old converted stable with lots of atmosphere and good, attentive service. But would it be unkind to declare just how much better the dinner was at Poggio Piglia the previous night? Because at Poggio Piglia (one can never have Pod-jo Pea-lia roll off the tongue too many times), chef Salvatore’s food was fresh and colourful and bursting with flavour. Plates of pink meats and creamy, oozing cheeses and hearty portions of pasta with things like wild boar ragu and shavings of Parmesan and black truffle. One delightful dish after another, served with glasses of deep, coma-inducing red wine and friendly chatter.

And so as we sit in romantic Montepulciano, discussing the practicalities of death by flaying, we wish that we were back at Poggio Piglia, our imposing stone fortress of a temporary home, kicking back in the reading room with the smell of lavender drifting in through the window and the sounds of dinnertime conversation hanging in the night air. Fortunately, it’s less than a half an hour drive back to the hotel and we are home just as the last of the Poggio Piglia diners are finishing off their nightcaps. It occurs to us, as we climb our little outside staircase, that Poggio Piglia is a place that – on a short break, at least – you don’t really need to leave. It has food, it has a pool and it has that all-important place to put down your head and plummet into a deep and rejuvenating sleep. In our case, a modern four-poster bed swathed with little wisps of white curtain; neatly furnished with plump pillows and crisp, cool sheets. There’s even a sachet of lavender from the garden, just to help us on our way, though with the various culinary indulgences of the evening it’s hardly necessary. We are asleep in our chic, Tuscan residence within minutes, dreaming of chariot races and hooded executioners and Russell Crowe.
 

Book now

Price per night from $219.52