Dispatch from Bagno Vignoni, Tuscany

Some gifts are immediate, like the plump pair of lamb chops the rotund and comically lupine chef James Beard once insisted on buying me after we’d begun chatting while waiting in line at the meat counter in Greenwich Village’s long-vanished but still much regretted Jefferson Market on Sixth Avenue between 10^th and 11^th Streets.

“You’re a skinny little runt, and you need some meat on your bones,” the chef told me, before he leaned into my necessarily parsimonious editorial assistant’s order of a half-pound of ground beef and a chicken breast.

Other gifts, like a book or a packet of seeds, require some time before they can be appreciated. And then there are those gifts that don’t immediately register as gifts, like the gentle suggestion made to me many years ago that La Posta, a hotel in the tiny Tuscan spa town of Bagno Vignoni, was the perfect place to “read and rest, swallow and wallow.” I politely book-marked the idea, but there was no urgent or logical reason for it to bob up in my thoughts during the fifteen years that had passed, until a couple of months ago on a pretty Spring Friday in Rome, where I’d come to interview an artist.

It was the rich oxtail-stew sauce on my plate of paccheri at Sora Lella, one of my favorite restaurants in the eternal city, that made me think of Marco, the sadly deceased Italian partner of my French sister-in-law. The last time I’d ever seen him, he’d cooked oxtail for Christmas Eve supper in Fiesole.

Though Marco had been unable to escape running the industrial business that had made three generations of his Tuscan family very wealthy, he was a quiet scholarly man who loved reading, art and good food as much as I do, which is why we became friends. Oddly, he also seemed to care about me, gently offering avuncular admonitions that I worked too much and urging me to slow down and take more time for myself and my couple.

So I thanked him for his recommendation all of those years ago and changed the subject, because solicitude makes me squirm.

“Alec, again, if you ever need a beautiful quiet place to rest, don’t forget La Posta in Bagno Vignoni. The food’s very good, and the owners are charming. I know you’d like it,” he said with the smoke of what may have been his 37th Marlboro Red of the day funneling from his nostrils.

So when this fully ripened idea suddenly bobbed up to the surface of my mind, I didn’t resist. After I’d finished my pasta, I ordered a coffee and a tiny icy grappa, and did something that I almost never do—I made spontaneous plans. I rebooked my impending afternoon flight from Rome to Marseille, the nearest airport to my village between Nimes and Avignon, to Monday, and continuing to jab away at my phone, I rented a little Fiat and booked myself a Comfort Room at La Posta for three nights.

Of course I had a lot of work waiting for me at home, but my spouse was away hiking with friends in Morocco. Still, the Puritan work-ethic that was deeply drilled into me by my parents never relents, and because I’m a self-employed writer, my default setting is work. I work almost all the time, and okay, okay, I’ll admit it, I work too much. So, my decision to head for La Posta was a sanity test as much as anything else.

On the outskirts of Rome, I stopped at a big shopping center and—only in Italy—found a great bathing suit, a pair of boxers with a beautiful red-coral-and-yellow starfish print on a turquoise background, because La Posta is also well known for its mineral water pools, both indoors and out. And then I drove north, skirting Lake Orvieto, and arriving in Bagno Vignoni, where I was met by sentries of cypress trees on both sides of the narrow road, late in the afternoon.

Originally a general store and post office (hence the name), La Posta was transformed into a hotel in the 1950s by the Marcucci family. In 2017 it was taken over by Michil Costa—the flamboyant and intellectual (he’s written a book about the horrors of mass tourism) owner of the small and intelligently luxurious chain, Casa Costa—who enjoyed his childhood holidays there. With a gracious welcome and a heavy brass key on a bowed fob with a tasseled skirt, my stay at La Posta, a four-story butter-yellow building with natty Bordeaux awnings on the ground floor windows, was launched with exactly the discretion and kindness I was searching for. The lovely man at the front desk asked if I wanted a reservation for dinner—I did—and if I’d like to book a Bath Under the Stars, their Friday night program of after-dark soaking in the outdoor mineral water pools. I hesitated.

“I think you’d enjoy it, Sir,” he said with a smile. “It’s from 8pm to 11pm, with the last entry at 10pm.” He paused, and then, “Why don’t I make you a reservation, and if you change your mind after a rest, that’s fine, too.”

In my pretty room with a view, there was an armchair by the window with beautiful views over the countryside and a very comfortable bed with an antique chestnut headboard. Absolutely immaculate, this hotel felt settled, safe and serene. When I woke from my nap, I didn’t even remember taking off my shoes, and amber-colored light filled my south-facing room just before sundown.

In the bar, before dinner, I was delighted and very surprised to discover that the nightly special cocktail was the Sazerac, a New Orleans sipper of rye with absinthe, Peychaud’s Bitters and a twist of lemon. While the bartender in a white jacket wielded his cocktail shaker, I glanced through the vinyl LPs in front of the turntable, and as soon as my drink arrived, I rested the arm on the disk to renew a long distant musical memory, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana brass’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights,” an album my parents loved to play in the mid-Seventies when they had friends over. The record slip itself was a smoldering totem of pre-pubescent eros for me and, I suspect, millions of other suburban boys.

In the veranda dining room, the tables were widely spaced, and most guests greeted one another as they came in for dinner. They were an elegant but comfortably dressed mixture of per bene Romans and Florentines, mostly middle-aged, plus a beautiful Swedish couple, three German ladies, an amorous young pair from Torino, two single ladies seated alone, and me. The comfort and cordiality of the room and the servers reminded me of the dining room at two American hotels that once loomed large in my life: the long-gone Shawmut Inn in Kennebunkport, Maine, a family vacation destination after my mother flatly refused to go to my father’s family’s house without electricity on an Adirondack lake anymore; and the White Elephant Hotel on Nantucket, where I held the distinction of being one of the worst waiters in America during two college summers. Costa, a casually elegant man with a puckish character, came over to greet our table, his small adjustments to the bread basket and the position of the bottle of wine on its coaster probably intended to make sure I noticed his immaculately manicured nails, prettily painted pink in a quiet celebration of Springtime.  

After an excellent meal of tagliolini with Cetara anchovy sauce and Maremma beef filet Rossini, I took my coffee in the lounge, where the two card tables were filled with people playing bridge and two ladies knitted in the round golden arc of light of antique floor lamps. The furnishings at the family-owned La Posta are an accretion of the dozens of decades this property had been family-owned, first as a holiday home and then as a hotel, which became a famous getaway for the La Dolce Vita crowd during the Sixties, as many black-and-white photos attest.

When I went downstairs to the spa space in my bathrobe for a nocturnal dip in the mineral-water pools, I was feeling a bit vulnerable, but as soon as I emerged through the barrier between the indoor pool and the outdoor one, the cool night air and shockingly bright stars were thrilling. I paddled to what I thought was an empty corner of the vast pool, only to find two women there chatting.

“Oh, sorry! I didn’t mean to intrude,” I said.

“No worries,” one of them said. “We were just talking about the new Colm Toibin novel. Have you read it?”

 “Do you mean Long Island?”

 “Yes.”

 “I just downloaded it today.”

So a claque of Toibin fans formed in the darkness, including me, and Elizabeth, an art history professor from London, and Alice, a Canadian book editor. I couldn’t possibly have wanted for better company. We gabbed and paddled until someone politely came to tell us that it was time to leave the warm mineral-rich waters and go to bed.

The following day, the three of us went to Pienza, one of the most delightful and under-the-radar towns in Tuscany, to visit Pienza Cathedral and the Piccolomini Palace. The latter was Pope Pius II’s summer residence and has a stunning roof garden with sweeping views of the surrounding valleys. Then we visited the Mulino Val d’Orcia, an artisanal pasta factory that works exclusively with flours made from the organically grown grains on its own farm, followed by a delicious lunch at La Locanda del Mulino of antipasti and fresh pici (like thick spaghetti) cacio e pepe. We went our own ways for an afternoon siesta, but met up again for dinner that night in tiny Bagno Vignoni’s best restaurant, the Osteria del Leone, which is just adjacent to the huge steaming pool that was once the heart of the convent of Bagno Vignoni, and doubtless a place where the Etruscans nursed their aches and pains even before the nuns did.   

Dinner that night felt like a special party, since three shy people had found each other and become friends. We ate and drank lavishly—chicken liver pate on toasted brioche with a foam of vin Santo and pickled red onions, beef tartare with olives, ricotta and anchovy sauce, paccheri alla carbonara and Bistecca alle Fiorentina with several bottles of red wine. At the end of our meal, we agreed that we’d never do goodbyes—both ladies were leaving in the morning, but that we would meet up again.

Sunday I spent the day reading and swimming in the gardens next to the mineral pools, and that night I went to the pizzeria down the street for a quick bite in the futile hope of avoiding the self-reflection a longer meal would allow. But it was a pleasant dinner. The only slightly chastening message I had for myself was to remember that I could say no, as in, no, I don’t want to write that article, because I’d rather read my book, cook, nap or maybe write a novel.

Marco was right. La Posta is one of the kindest, gentlest and most civilized hotels I’ve ever been to. It’s a place I left yearning to return to, alone, or in my couple, or with friends. My only regret is that it took me so many years to act on his suggestion, so please don’t make the same mistake, because you probably need this place as much as I did.