Here are the available villas for rental in Tuscany.

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. ... more

This culture club is a hit for family campers

From the Mail on Sunday

The moment I heard the words I knew I had walked into a trap. We were midway through our annual negotiations over holiday destinations and the three children were determined to go to Italy.
'Are you mad?' I asked. 'Do you have any idea how far Italy is? We have to take the car, and gîtes (or whatever they call a gîte in Italy) there cost a fortune.' There was a pause, then the feared words. 'We could go camping-' It is, I suppose, the moment virtually every parent dreads. Along with divorce, moving house and bereavement there can be few worse experiences than when the children suddenly decide it's time for a camping holiday.
To them camping promises adventure, exploration and balmy nights under canvas. To the parents, it conjures up images of shared toilet blocks, seas of mud and two weeks of barely concealed squalor.
All of which, of course, is nothing new to parents. We've been there and, with the wisdom of age, have no desire to go back. It hadn't entered my head to spend a full summer holiday on a campsite since I was a teenager, when the cheapness and nomadic nature of it all seemed so appealing.
Since those days of gales in Avignon and furnace-like heat in Montpellier I had become a fully paid-up member of the Gîte Set. I've done them all, through the length of France, from Normandy in the north to Perpignan in the south, even venturing as far as the Costa Brava in Spain. All of these holidays had certain things in common: a roof over our heads, integral plumbing and electricity. And that was just fine by me.
So camping had not only not featured high on my list of holiday priorities, it hadn't featured at all. But the children were determined and promised it would be cheaper and more fun than staying in a 'boring old house'. The brochures promised luxury mobile homes if you didn't want to languish under canvas (a big yes to the mobile home from the parents and a plea for tents from the children), swimming pools, tennis courts, restaurants, bars and shops all on site.
Of course, I didn't believe a word of it. I'm not that stupid. But eventually we chose Tuscany (all that sunshine, red-roofed towns and the Blair family) with a week at two separate campsites. ... more

Scary roads and scorpions in the bedroom

From the Mail on Sunday

When you book a self-catering property, it is often a triumph of hope over experience. A hard-bitten journalist, especially, should be sceptical. I realised this when we stalled our car on the vertiginously rising farm track deep in the heart of the Chianti countryside. The light was failing fast, our daughters, Flora, ten, and Alice, seven, were crying and frightened on the back seat and we had no idea where we were going to spend the night.
Hopelessly lost, I desperately tried to coax the hired Fiat Punto into a hill start, but admitted defeat as the car slid back. Gingerly I reversed to the bottom of the hill. Changing into first gear and slamming the accelerator to the floor, we took a wheel-juddering, stone-popping run at the brute. At its summit some Italian holidaymakers - who were trying to help us find the farmhouse where we were meant to be staying - waited patiently. <br/> Having driven from Pisa airport that afternoon, we had successfully navigated our way to the start of the farm track leading to Borgo Navico. It was here that our troubles began. The directions said: 'Drive between two small farmhouses on to an unmade road, then follow the signs left for Navico.' Someone, however, had turned the two signs to Navico around to face the wrong direction.
Nothing in the promotional literature, moreover, had prepared us for the sheer steepness, roughness or hairpin twistiness of the unmetalled road. It rose and fell like a twisting roller coaster, curling its way precipitously through the Tuscan agricultural countryside. It also forked. Our first stab at finding the apartment took us shuddering and bucking up into a gloomy farmyard where we were promptly surrounded by snarling, leaping alsatians.
Trying a second fork, we climbed steadily until we ended up outside another farmhouse. This one, however, was shuttered and barred, although signs warned of guard dogs. We retreated once more. By now night was descending. As a last resort we enlisted the help of some young Italian holidaymakers staying in a farmhouse at the foot of the track. In convoy, we set up the track yet again. This was the point when the car stalled. ... more

Island hopping off Tuscany

From the Daily Mail

Nothing comes close to the euphoria you feel when you first see your very own yacht, although this was not strictly ours, I suppose. Our group - myself and five youngsters - had chartered the 38-footer with three double cabins and two bathrooms or 'heads' as they are called in nautical parlance. It also had a CD player and all the latest navigational aids and was to be our home for a week.
Before I found the yacht's details on the internet, I imagined it would be a trip too expensive to even contemplate. Yet, by taking her before the main holiday season, we managed to reduce the price to less than that of an average hotel - even with the services of a skipper included.
We had paced the house trying to imagine exactly how long 38ft was, and what it would be like living with five others - plus our captain - in that amount of space. We wondered how we would fit our luggage in and if there would be any room to sit out of the midday sun, or to find a private place to sunbathe on the deck.
The questions were about to be answered. A one-and-a-half drive from Rome airport brought us to the charming little Tuscan town of Porto Ercole, stopping only at the supermarket to load up with local wine, salami and mozzarella.
We then met our captain, Scianti, at the Bar Centrale in the main street before following him to the harbour. Things were looking promising. Although only 26, Scianti - whose parents had named him after the Indian word for peace - was reassuringly capable-looking.
He was deeply tanned and appeared strong enough to coil the ropes singlehandedly, or even climb the rigging on the lookout. And then, there she was, the boat herself - the Blue Stream - with a gleaming white hull and spangly rigging. It was flying the Blue Ensign and moored among a veritable forest of sailing boats, fishing vessels and cabin cruisers at the little jetty.
It must be one of the prettiest ports in Italy, dominated on all sides by 17th-century Spanish castles. Half an hour later, having stowed everything according to the captain's instructions, we could not wait to get into our bikinis and plaster ourselves with factor 60 suntan lotion - very necessary at sea.
We then putted out of the harbour looking for wind and, soon after, Scianti hoisted the mainsail. Though there was no more than a slight breeze, he pointed the yacht, with the engine still running, towards the little island of Giglio, about two hours away.
It was the start of a perfect holiday. It was great to know that boat owners have no commitment to demanding timetables, in fact, no master at all - other than the weather. ... more

Fabulous at Forte

Fifty years ago, Forte dei Marmi was a summer playground for the international set, the place where Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour came to live the real-life Dolce Vita.
By the Seventies - when I visited every summer with my family - the glitterati were gone, leaving Forte to its wealthy obscurity.
Now the Tuscan resort has been rediscovered by a retro-hip crowd of fashionistas who love its mid-century architecture, beautiful beaches and chic shops.
That's why I've returned for a long weekend to find out if it's truly back in fashion - even hoping to spot a celeb or two.
Giorgio Armani bought an enormous house here several years ago, paving the way for fellow fashionistas such as Paul Smith and Miuccia Prada, who have become regular visitors (Prada's factory - and its excellent outlet - are only two hours away, south of Florence).
Avant-garde celebrities including David Bowie and Yoko Ono have also visited and photographers regularly shoot fashion spreads on the beach.
In fact, that beach is Forte's greatest draw - one of the best in Europe, with wide, pristine sands and dozens of immaculate bagni, or bathing houses. Models from those photo-shoots return here to holiday.
The beach is private so you'll pay for the privilege of sitting under an umbrella, but the amenities more than make up for it.
I'm tipped off that if I'm looking for the A-list I should try Annetta, a bagno at the end of a long, lush driveway. It's like a colonial club, filled with bamboo furniture, and has a large pool surrounded by thatched umbrellas.
The crowd's chic enough but I don't recognise anyone, so I head to the Hotel Augustus - a five-star beachfront property favoured by the famous and once a holiday home for Fiat's Agnelli family.
When I was a child, the hotel behind enormous hedges seemed exotic and out of reach; today it looks exactly the same, only less forbidding and twice as chic. ... more