Casa Elisabetta

My wife and I with two of our friends travelled to Tuscany in May and spent three weeks at Casa Elisabetta in Montescudaio, a hilltop village that’s a 45 minute drive from Pisa. The Casa was delightful, spotlessly clean, filled with some interesting antiques, and featured a fully-equipped kitchen plus lots of comfortable seating for lounging and eating. Our hosts, Elanora and Fabio, were very helpful and kept the grounds around the Casa beautifully maintained. The Casa has a bedroom and bathroom with shower downstairs, and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. There’s a lovely balcony off the loungeroom with stunning views over rolling Tuscan hills from which on most evenings we could view the magnificent sunsets. If you want to walk into the village, it’s roughly a 45-minute uphill journey for us oldies. To get around the region for daytrips to other villages, usually about an hour to an hour-and-a-half away, you’ll definitely need a car – the smaller the better as most roads are very narrow. There’s free parking for cars in Montescudaio so it’s easy to drive up and down the hill for trips to town. And there’s a bus from the village to the nearest railway station in Cecina if you want to travel further afield.

We did find the stairs in the Casa a bit challenging as we’re all in our seventies and there are no handrails. The TV isn’t a smart TV so about all we could access were shopping channels in Italian and German, but free wi-fi access was part of our package so that compensated. Also, it would have been helpful to have printed instructions in English for the appliances – washer, air con and dishwasher, as well as directions to the nearest supermarket and information about where to leave the rubbish and recyclables for collection.