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Tuscany at my feet

From the Mail on Sunday
Culture is fine in small doses. Too much concentrated art and architecture and I start longing to escape to the countryside. So the idea of a walking tour through the Sienese hill towns of Italy seemed perfect.
Best of all, the walking would be unencumbered, with all our luggage whisked on ahead to await our arrival at each hotel. Hearty ramblers might scoff but, along with my wife Rosie and eight-year-old son Edmond, I was happy to amble gently along.
We took a flight to Bologna, then a train to Florence, where a taxi was waiting to drive us to the first night's hotel in Volterra.
Most parties spend two nights in this glorious walled city. We were pushed for time and had just one night before being driven to the start of our first day's walk - an inviting woodland path.
It was early spring and the ground was spangled with anemones, primulas, violets and cyclamen.
After two or three hours, we emerged into open country, with fresh, luminous greens and yellows, geometric cross-hatching of trained vines, silvery olives and Tuscany's quintessential punctuation marks - the dark, pencil-thin cypress trees.
Just before stopping for our picnic lunch we caught our first glimpse of that day's objective - the city of San Gimignano, whose medieval skyscrapers are familiar from filmed Forster novels and Zeffirelli's Tea With Mussolini.
Plodding up the final approach, past all the tour buses, I couldn't help but feel a certain smugness at arriving on foot.
Our room at the Hotel Bel Soggiorno was perfect, with its terracotta tiled floor and lovely view. We ate excellent food at the nearby Mandragola restaurant.
In San Gimignano every facade seems to boast some different quirky architectural detail but in the end your eye is drawn inevitably upwards to the 15 towers remaining from the original 72, erected during the height of the Guelph-Ghibelline rivalry.
Sticking firmly to my small-dose cultural policy, we limited sightseeing to a few highlights, interrupted by lunch at a delightful wine merchant's establishment on the Via della Innocenti.

Read more in our destination guide to Tuscany.