I’d need the rest, it turned out. I happened to be at Villa San Michele on its opening weekend, for which a glittering lineup of design tastemakers—Alexa Chung, Athena Calderone, and Martin herself among them—had descended on Fiesole to toast to the property’s renaissance. The festivities began with a welcome party where cocktails infused with Santa Maria Novella rose elixir (complete with the flowers suspended in ice cubes) were served on silver platters, and bounteous platters of prosciutto and parmigiano lay next to lumaconi pasta churned around an enormous cheese wheel to make a piquant cacio e pepe, then passed around in miniature Ginori bowls.
And the following evening, the open-air loggia that directly overlooks the city—under normal circumstances, the location of the hotel’s fine-dining Antesi restaurant—had been set up with one long, candlelit table for an extravagant dinner of amberjack panzanella and sea bass with mussels and clams. There, the weekend’s guest of honor emerged: none other than the grande dame of wellness herself, Gwyneth Paltrow, who sat chatting with Belmond’s CEO Dan Ruff in an Altuzarra gown; she’d spent part of her day enjoying a gong bath session at the chapel in the forest, naturally. If I’m being honest, though, the real highlight of the evening happened when we headed into a cavernous room lit entirely by candlelight, where a fresco of the Last Supper could be glimpsed through the flickering light on one wall, and a heaving antique table had been laid with an eye-popping array of desserts from towers of cannoli and sfogliatelle and rum babas—even the most grandiose of the Medicis would surely have been impressed. (The festivities continued as DJ Isabella Massenet spun disco classics until the very early hours of the morning.)
Though the part of the weekend which captured the spirit of Villa San Michele 2.0 better than any, in my humble opinion, was a morning spent exploring the gardens of various villas around Fiesole—most of which are not open to the general public and have been opened up to guests thanks to the tireless pursuits of the hotel’s concierge. A fleet of electric three-wheeled Piaggio Apes pulled up onto the driveway to whizz us down the hairpin bends to the Villa Medici, today the private home of an Italian family, whose terraced gardens set the blueprint for centuries of horticultural design. Next, it was onto the Villa Gamberaia, for sweeping views of the city beyond its parterre gardens and grottoes. I’m lucky enough to have spent many months of my life exploring every nook and cranny of Florence—in a past life, I worked for a few years as an art history guide around Italy, spending weeks at a time exploring the cities and Renaissance and Etruscan treasures—but these were places I’d never had the chance to visit; in fact, that I’d never even really heard about.
