To Tuscany, with luxury
VILLA | Rent can top $10,000 a week, but it sleeps plenty
A week in Tuscany sounds like a pretty good vacation to most folks.
A week in your own Tuscan villa ... now that's really la dolce vita.
(Courtesy)
The sweet life is what the Murphy family of Clarendon Hills got a taste of last June when they spent a week with another suburban Chicago family in Villa Fronzola, an 18th century hilltop home they rented near the Tuscan town of Lucca.
They lounged in their private swimming pool and hot tub under the Tuscan sun and practiced bocce ball on the neatly trimmed lawn. The adults played cards and drank wine until the wee hours in their secluded stone villa, surrounded by terraces of olive and fruit trees.
"All you could see were mountains everywhere -- it was like the 'Sound of Music,'" said Mary Beth Murphy, who traveled to Italy with her husband, Rich. The Murphys' four boys came along, too. So did another couple. And their three boys.
With this kind of entourage, plenty of space was a necessity. And their seven-bedroom villa didn't disappoint.
"It was huge," Murphy said. "I don't think we sat in half the places. It was gorgeous, too -- that old Tuscan look. One of the rooms had angels painted on the walls."
With four boys ranging in age from 13 to 20, the Murphys are used to renting homes when they vacation. They typically hunt for a rental property on the Web and book it themselves.
This time, the stakes were higher. They wanted a villa -- in Italy, no less.
"Because it was a foreign country, we didn't know what we'd be getting into," Murphy said. "We needed English-speaking people who knew the area and were familiar with different homes."
They turned to Homebase Abroad, a Massachusetts-based company that specializes in Italian villa vacations. Homebase Abroad co-owner Mara Solomon started the business in 1995 after renting an estate outside Florence for her honeymoon. Solomon's vacation was fantastic, but setting it up was a time-consuming hassle. She thought there had to be a better way, and she'd come up with it.
Now, Homebase Abroad represents about 50 privately owned villas in Tuscany, Umbria, the Amalfi Coast and Lake Como. Staff personally check out each of the properties at least once a year, so they're intimately familiar with their inventory.
"Our American eyes and ears have been there," Solomon said. "We've sat on the beds and gone to the local village, so when we talk to guests we're speaking from experience."
The company works with customers to pinpoint the right villa -- in the right price range. Homebase Abroad's villas start around $6,400 a week and go all the way up to $65,900 during high season for a Renaissance villa in Chianti. A lot of money? You bet. But that Renaissance villa sleeps 31 people. And $10,000 a week divided among four couples, for example, doesn't look too bad for a week in Italy when you consider the pummeling the dollar has taken from the euro. (The least expensive time to rent an Italian villa is generally November through April, excluding holidays. You'll pay the most during high season, which runs from June through September.)
The Murphys' villa came with a $11,700 price tag for a seven-night stay in late June. That's more than they budgeted when they set out villa shopping, "but we decided if we're gonna do it, we might as well do it well."
Both families flew into Rome, picked up their rental cars and made the drive to Villa Fronzola. Walkie-talkies let them keep in touch with each other on the road. That's how Rich Murphy learned his car's brake lights were on the fritz. Driving especially carefully, they arrived several hours later at their hilltop oasis, where a five-course Italian feast was waiting for them -- a special treat they'd arranged in advance through Homebase Abroad. The company also helped the families find private tour guides to take them around certain cities, and it lined up a bike ride along the ancient fortress walls of nearby Lucca.
If the Murphys encountered any problems with the villa or needed something as simple as directions to the grocery store, an English-speaking "concierge" lived nearby and was ready to help. That was a big selling point for Murphy. So was Villa Fronzola's location.
"We wanted to use the house as our base and spend our days taking side trips," Murphy said. "We have four boys, so we don't just sit on the beach and wiggle our toes on vacation -- we want adventure."
Hot spots like Florence and Pisa were only about a two-hour drive away. Same goes for the picturesque string of cliffside villages known as Cinque Terre, where they made two visits over the course of a week because their sons couldn't get enough of jumping off the cliffs into the Ligurian Sea.
"We did a lot except for the very last day. We never left the villa," Murphy said. "We played bocce ball, sat by the pool and drank wine. We pretended that was where we lived."
For information, contact Homebase Abroad at www.homebaseabroad.com or (781) 639-4040.