Florence, then the sea.
An old Italian habit, and still the right one.
Our team spent a week between two hotels eighty minutes apart. By the end of it, everyone agreed they work best as a pair. Florence first.
Go in spring, after the beach clubs open for the season and before the heat settles on Florence. Start with the city. Florence asks a lot of a visitor, so give it the energy while you still have it.
Villa Cora
Florence
You notice the hill before anything else. Villa Cora sits above Florence rather than in it, which sounds like a compromise and turns out to be the whole point. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to the Pitti Palace, the Boboli Gardens, the Ponte Vecchio. Less on the complimentary shuttle, which everyone has worked out by day three.
Then you climb back up, the noise falls away somewhere around the gate, and you’re in a private Italian garden with yew and oak and more than a hundred varieties of roses. There’s a heated pool at the bottom of the garden, and in spring that changes the whole trip. You can do the city in the morning and swim at three.
Inside, it is unapologetically a nineteenth-century villa. Baron Oppenheim built it in the 1870s and clearly told Pietro Comparini to hold nothing back. Frescoed ceilings, a Moorish salon, a former games room with playing cards painted into the ceiling. Eugénie de Montijo owned it afterwards. The 2010 restoration is why it still reads as a private house rather than a period exhibit.
Forty-four rooms, split between the main villa, the Villino Eugenia above the Boboli, and two in La Follie at the edge of the garden. Ask for La Follie if you’d rather not be found.
Dinner is at Le Bistrot by the pool. Drinks at the Santa Garden Cocktail Club, or in the Salotto if the evening turns cool. Ask about the Bellevue Roof Terrace. It’s by arrangement only, and on a clear night it’s the table to book. There’s a spa underneath all of it, BENè, if the walking has caught up with you.
Then you drive. Highway most of the way, the Apuan Alps filling the windshield for the last twenty minutes, and the air is cooler by the time you park.
Hotel Byron
Forte dei Marmi
If Villa Cora is a garden with a city at the bottom of it, Byron is a beach with a mountain range behind it.
The bones are the same. An aristocratic villa, a family that took it on and turned it into a hotel, low buildings set back in a private garden. What differs is the handling. The old villa stays warm and classic. The Sasso wing next door is cooler and more modern. You pick which version you want to wake up in.
Luchino Visconti spent thirty summers in Forte dei Marmi, which tells you what kind of town this has always been. The setting does the rest. The hotel faces the sea. Turn around and the Apuan Alps are behind you, the Carrara quarries showing white along the ridge.
Salvatore Madonna is the owner, and the service is the kind that makes people describe a hotel as a house. La Magnolia is the Michelin-starred one, where Marco Bernardo cooks Tuscany with Campania folded into it, which is his own background. Onda is the poolside one, easier, and the one our team kept drifting back to. There’s also Byron Art, a permanent program of contemporary work through the hotel.
Outside the gate, the beach clubs belong to the town. Italian families take the same cabina their grandparents took, and it has stayed theirs. The town is flat, green and quiet. Old houses, serious shopping, a market worth building a morning around. Bike everywhere. Nobody needs a car once they’ve arrived.
