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Kicking back in Italy for a few days:

I’m starting to think that the real joy of an Italian villa holiday is not much in the grand gestures but in the little stolen days. You wake up without an alarm and make coffee that tastes better, just because you are looking at olive groves and decide that today’s big plan is one trip to the village bakery. That is it. That is the plan. After years of holidays that felt like military operations, this still feels faintly revolutionary. Italy is very well suited to this kind of stay. The country is well-suited for self-catering wanderers who want to dip in and out of local life. Tuscany is still the obvious heavyweight, with its honey-coloured farmhouses between vineyards and hills that stretch on like a Renaissance backdrop. You can spend a long weekend near Siena or Montepulciano wandering around, taking wine tastings and aimless drives on strade bianche. To the east, Umbria is much the same slow rhythm, but without more tour buses and a slightly wilder, greener landscape. It is the underdog sibling of Tuscany, and for that reason many people prefer it. If your idea of a few days away is salt on your skin and limoncello at noon, the Amalfi Coast and Puglia are hard to beat. A cottage near Positano or Ravello offers those dizzying cliff views without the claustrophobia of a packed hotel terrace. Down in Puglia you find trulli, those conical stone huts that look like something from a fairy tale. Some have been converted into staggeringly luxurious retreats with infinity pools and outdoor kitchens. Others are easier, perhaps with a temperamental shower and furniture that has seen better days, but they are still a fraction of the price and they are as pretty as all the others. In terms of cost, the range of accommodation is quite broad. In the top end of it, you might have a restored farmhouse with air conditioning that works, a pizza oven and a housekeeper who leaves a few fresh figs on the kitchen counter. On the budget end you could be in a slightly shabby cottage where the fridge sings and the shutters need a good shove but the terrace is still catching the evening sun and the neighbours wave. Both have their place. I have had luxury-like places where I occasionally felt guilty about how nice everything was and I have had lower-cost places where the plumbing was a bit eccentric but the memories were much better. What ties everything together is the food, which is never just food in Italy but a kind of regional dialect. In Tuscany you eat ribollita and bistecca, heavy and honest. Everything on the coast is lighter, brighter, drenched in olive oil and lemon. In Puglia you are served orecchiette with turnip tops and burrata so fresh that it weeps milk. The joy of having your own kitchen allows you to head to a morning market, buy tomatoes that really smell of something and try a lunch that takes three hours to prepare and fifteen minutes to eat. You will likely cook poorly compared to the locals but it will taste fantastic, the ingredients won’t let you down. The culture changes too. Northern lake towns like Bellagio or Malcesine are so Swiss in their politeness and order, all clipped hedges and ferry timetables. Travel south and the volume increases, the gestures grow larger, and time becomes a thing that can be negotiable. A few days is enough to notice these differences without fully understanding them and it’s part of the magic. You’re a visitor, not an expert, and Italy doesn’t want you to go to a super-technical level. Some of the best moments are when you do very little at all. I remember sitting in a pool in rural Umbria and there was only the sound of a distant tractor and some very opinionated cicadas and it was so peaceful there in the wilderness. There is something in the silence in that very rural Italian countryside that you can hear only church bells or a dog barking three valleys away. It invites a gentle, unbound reflection. You think about nothing much and the nothing feels productive. Of course contrast is everything. After two days of that hush, driving down to a chaotic coastal town like Vietri sul Mare or Camogli feels like stepping into a different country. The narrow streets are packed with scooters, washing hangs over the streets like bunting and every bar seems to be arguing about football. You order a granita and watch teenagers on Vespas narrowly avoid elderly men on Vespas and you realise that this is exactly the holiday you needed. The bustle recharges you in a different way. The people you meet stick with you. There is the owner who hands you keys and explains the boiler with the resigned patience of someone who has done this two hundred times. There is the neighbour who brings you a bowl of cherries and speaks only in dialect and so you communicate through smiles and pointing. And then there is always someone who doesn’t fit into a category. On one trip to Le Marche I met a local man by the name of Franco who had made himself the unofficial mayor of the lane. He wore three layers of clothing in thirty-degree heat, carried a clipboard for no reason and would always look over everyone’s bins every morning, with a kind of theatrical seriousness. If your recycling was a little bit inaccurate, he would give a ten-minute lecture that was half scolding and half stand-up comedy. He was impossible to translate accurately but my partner and I cried laughing every time. Such encounters occur not in hotel lobbies. A short villa break in Italy is not all about seeing everything. It is about seeing less, but seeing it properly. It is about burnt shoulders, too much wine, a kitchen table covered in crumbs, and that golden light that falls on a terrace at six in the evening. You return home a little dishevelled, probably having eaten too much bread, and already wondering which region you might ignore a guidebook in next.
Have a great vacation in Italy from the EUCottages travel team