Italy for Two

A private guide to romantic escapes across the peninsula, for couples who have travelled enough to want something quieter than the postcard.

Romantic travel, at the highest end, is rarely about romance in the sense that brochures use the word. It is not, in our long experience of arranging it, about rose petals on the bed or a private dinner on a beach with a heart traced in candles. Couples who have travelled deeply together, often for many years, are looking for something else. They are looking for hours that feel borrowed from a different life — long, slow, unscheduled hours in a place that knows how to receive two people who simply want to be left alone together.

What the Couple Tells Us

We always ask, when designing an itinerary for two, what the couple's last great trip together was. The answer is more diagnostic than any questionnaire. A pair who returns from Japan describing temple gardens and kaiseki dinners is one pair; a pair who returns from a safari describing the silence of the bush is another; a pair who has been to Italy four times before and is still asking for Italy is a third. Each calls for a different planning logic.

We also ask, more carefully, about the rhythm of their days at home. Some couples are in genuine need of stillness; for them, the wrong itinerary is one that fills every hour. Others are restless, and an unplanned afternoon will become an anxious afternoon. We design accordingly. The most romantic itinerary, in our reading, is the one that matches the natural pace of the two people taking it.

Lake Como, but Not the Way You Think

Lake Como is the obvious answer for romance and, like most obvious answers, often the right one. But the Lake Como of the cliché — Bellagio in summer, the Grand Hotel Tremezzo in August, dinner at Mistral — is a lake under heavy social load. We rarely send couples there in those weeks. We send them in late April, when the gardens of Villa Carlotta are in full azalea, and in October, when the chestnut trees turn and the lake itself empties of motor traffic.

Our preferred address for two is not always the headline hotel. It is sometimes Villa d'Este, of course — there is no hotel garden in Italy quite like its — but it is also Il Sereno, the more contemporary property on the eastern shore, smaller and quieter, with a suite that sits directly above the water. From either, a private wooden boat can collect a couple for an early-morning passage to Como town for a coffee, or for an evening crossing to Villa del Balbianello opened privately for them after the public closes. These are not expensive hours by the standards of the place. They are simply considered.

The Tuscan Country, in Spring

If Lake Como is the lake of heightened romance, the Tuscan country is the country of slow romance. A villa in the Val d'Orcia for a week, with a private chef cooking three nights of the seven, a vintage open-top car for the daytime drives, and absolutely nothing scheduled before noon. We work with several estates around Pienza and Montalcino that take only one couple at a time, with the staff present in the morning and effectively invisible by lunch.

The drives are the particular pleasure. The road from Pienza to Bagno Vignoni at six in the evening, when the cypress alleys cast long shadows and the light goes copper. The road from Montalcino down to the Argentario coast for a single night at Il Pellicano. The road that runs east toward Cortona through the Valdichiana, with stops at vineyards we have arranged in advance for tastings of three or four bottles that never leave the property. None of these drives are long. None of them are spectacular in the Alpine sense. They are, however, the kind of hours one remembers.

The Smaller Possibilities

There is a second tier of Italian destinations, less famous, that we increasingly recommend for couples on their second or third Italian holiday. The island of Pantelleria, off the Sicilian coast, where one stays in a restored dammuso of black volcanic stone with a private cook and a small saltwater pool, and where the romance is the romance of solitude rather than display. The Cilento coast south of Salerno, still genuinely wild, where the Hotel Cala del Porto and a few private villas anchor a few days of swimming and reading. The Aeolian Islands in late September, after the season closes — Salina especially, with the small hotel Capofaro on its capers-and-Malvasia estate.

SicilyThese are the journeys we send our most travelled couples on, and they are the ones from which the longest letters of thanks return.