Renting in Tuscany, direct from owners

What people come to Tuscany for is not a monument but a landscape, and that landscape is a piece of work: hills tilled for centuries, cypresses planted in avenues to mark the approaches, fields of wheat and olive whose shapes follow the contours. Nothing here is wild, and that is exactly what makes it calm.

The casale. The house you rent is most often an old farm, built of stone and brick, with terracotta floors, beamed ceilings and very thick walls. Many were restored from the nineteen-seventies on, as farming receded: so you find a pool and a modern kitchen in an eighteenth-century building. The other form is the agriturismo, a working estate renting out a few units — less independent, often cheaper, and you buy the wine or the oil at the door.

Where, depending on what you want to see. Chianti, between Florence and Siena, is the most asked for: vineyards, fortified villages, and an hour at most to either city. The Val d'Orcia, to the south, gives the bare hills of the photographs, Pienza and Montalcino, and lighter crowds. The Maremma, on the southern coast, adds the sea and pine woods, with little-visited Etruscan towns. The Lunigiana and the Casentino, to the north, are mountainous, green and markedly cheaper.

Towns are for visiting, not necessarily for staying. Florence, Siena, Lucca and Pisa are reached by train or an hour's drive from most of the countryside, and parking there is governed by limited traffic zones whose fines arrive months later. Staying in the country and taking the train for a day in town avoids both problems.

When to come. May, June, September and October: the hills are green in spring, golden in autumn, and the grape harvest falls in September. July and August are hot — thirty-five degrees inland — and that is when wall thickness counts. Winter is mild, damp and very quiet, with the olive harvest in November.

What you do from the house. A Tuscan farmhouse is usually let by the week, and the stay is built around it rather than as constant moving about. The wine roads of Chianti and Montalcino take half a day, estate by estate, and tastings at the smaller places are booked the day before. The hot springs at Bagno Vignoni and Saturnia are free at some points and charged at others, and warm all year. And every town has its weekly market, still the best place to buy what you will cook that evening.

Our Tuscan addresses are rented direct from their owners, who know which dirt road leads to their door and where to leave a car for the train to Florence.