Sometimes the best travel days are the ones when you don’t really do very much at all.
Our Villa Barberino stay in Tuscany gave us exactly what we needed before officially becoming home owners in Italy. We had arrived tired, a little travel-weary and very aware that in just a couple of days, we were going to do something that still didn’t feel entirely real.
We were going to buy a house in Tuscany.
But before that happened, we had one full day with nowhere we absolutely needed to be.
Well…almost nowhere.
Because This Wasn’t Quite a Vacation…
As lovely as it would have been to spend the entire day wandering through the gardens at Villa Barberino, we had a house to prepare for—a house we didn’t technically own yet.
So after a wonderfully slow morning, we temporarily traded the cypress trees and old stone walls for a drive toward Florence and IKEA.
Very glamorous.
There were a few things we knew we would need right away once we got the keys, including a mattress. That sounded simple enough until we saw the mattress.
Looking at the enormous rolled-up bundle and then looking at our rental car, I could almost see Ron doing the calculations in his head. After folding seats, moving luggage and doing the kind of spatial reasoning that IKEA apparently requires before you even get to the furniture assembly, we somehow got it in.
Success!
With our mattress wedged into the car, we headed back toward Villa Barberino—and toward what would become one of my favorite afternoons of the entire trip.
An Afternoon With Absolutely Nothing on the Agenda…
Instead of squeezing in another town or adding another stop to our itinerary, we did something that doesn’t always come naturally to us when we travel.
Nothing.
We changed clothes, found chairs beside the pool and settled in. There was no sightseeing list and no feeling that we needed to make the most of every minute. We were already exactly where we wanted to be.
The pool sits among the gardens of the villa, surrounded by the kind of Tuscan scenery that almost makes you wonder whether someone arranged it specifically for the photographs—cypress trees, rolling hills and old stone buildings.
And then came the sheep.
The Best Things Aren’t Always Planned…
At some point that afternoon, Ron was walking around the pool when he noticed something moving in the field below us. A herd of sheep.
We stood and watched as the dogs worked together, circling and guiding them across the field. There was something so peaceful about it—standing beside a swimming pool in Tuscany, watching sheep make their way across the countryside below us.
No tour guide had brought us there. It wasn’t on an itinerary. We hadn’t read about it in a travel guide or saved it to a Pinterest board.
It just happened.
And maybe that’s why I remember it so clearly.
I’m beginning to realize that some of my favorite memories from Italy aren’t necessarily the days when we see the most. They’re often the moments when we finally stop trying to see anything at all.
That afternoon was one of them.
Dinner With a View…
Eventually, we traded our pool clothes for dinner clothes and walked to Il Tributo, Villa Barberino’s restaurant.
Our table was outside on the terrace overlooking the lake and the hills beyond. Somehow, just when I thought the day couldn’t get much prettier, the evening light proved me wrong.
We ate slowly, talked and watched the light change across the landscape.
And we lingered.
Italy seems to be particularly good at reminding us how to do that.
Il Tributo has been a part of Villa Barberino since 1991 and celebrates Tuscan cooking with a refined take on traditional flavors. But as lovely as dinner was, what I remember most isn’t one particular dish.
It’s the view. It’s sitting across from Ron. It’s knowing what the next day held and having that wonderful feeling that, for the moment, there was absolutely nowhere else we needed to be.
Sometimes the setting becomes part of the meal.
This was definitely one of those times.
We Didn’t See Everything—and That Was Okay.
There was actually quite a bit at Villa Barberino that we never explored. The property has a historic wine cellar carved into the rock, with origins stretching back centuries, as well as a small museum housed in an old olive mill that preserves pieces of Tuscany’s rural history.
We didn’t make it to either one.
There was a time when that would have bothered me. If we were somewhere special, I felt like we needed to see it all, do it all, and make the most of every minute.
But this time, the swimming pool won.
And I don’t regret it for a second.
Looking back now, I think that’s what made our stay at Villa Barberino so special. It wasn’t simply where we slept before closing on our house.
We had spent months searching listings, studying towns, making lists, crunching numbers, wondering, dreaming and eventually deciding to take a chance on an old home in a little Tuscan hill town.
And suddenly, we were here—not quite tourists anymore, but not quite homeowners either.
For two nights, we were somewhere wonderfully in between.
We wandered through gardens, spent an afternoon beside the pool, watched sheep being herded across a Tuscan field and lingered over dinner as the light disappeared beyond the hills.
For a little while, we simply let ourselves enjoy being there.
The next morning, we would load the car—enormous IKEA mattress and all—and head toward Montepulciano. We had an appointment with a notary. There would be papers to sign, keys to receive, and probably more than a few moments when Ron and I looked at each other and thought, Are we really doing this?
Yes.
We really were.
And by the end of that day, Tuscany wouldn’t just be a place we loved coming back to.
We would have a home here.
More to come…
Tina
