Relais Borgo Santo Pietro

The estate sits on the ancient Via Francigena, the pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome, and has been a place of healing and restoration for over 800 years; the spa is not a hotel amenity so much as a continuation of history

Ask the sommelier about the estate's own wine labels, produced from vines on the property and available only to guests and at the restaurants

There are luxury hotels in Tuscany that feed you well, and then there is Borgo Santo Pietro, which feeds you in a way that quietly reorders your understanding of what food can be. The estate's 300 acres yield almost everything that arrives at the table, the sheep's milk worked each morning into cheese and yogurt at the on-site dairy, the vegetables lifted from the kitchen gardens by the master gardener, the honey from the estate's own bees, and executive chef Ariel Hagen treats this extraordinary larder with the reverence it deserves. Dinner at the Saporium is Michelin-starred and feels it, though never in the way that makes you sit up straighter and enjoy yourself less. The treehouse restaurant, Trattoria Sull'Albero, built around the spreading boughs of a great oak, is the kind of place you find yourself returning to every evening, ordering the same handmade pasta and feeling not in the least bit guilty about it

The 22 rooms, each one individually conceived, hand-frescoed, furnished with antiques sourced on the owners' personal travels, have the particular quality of feeling as though they were designed for you specifically, rather than for the category of person who books rooms like this. Some open onto private pools; others onto terraced gardens or Mediterranean courtyards where outdoor fireplaces glow on cool evenings. The public spaces have that well-worn luxury that takes either generations or very serious intention to achieve: leather armchairs beside open fires, fresh flowers from the cutting garden, and a brick wine cellar stocked with boutique labels that reward serious exploration

Borgo Santo Pietro was a sanctuary for medieval pilgrims working their way along the Via Francigena, and something of that restorative calling persists. The spa draws on the same philosophy, ancient herbal knowledge, and the healing properties of the estate's own plants that gave rise to Seed to Skin, the proprietary skincare range developed in an on-site laboratory and found nowhere else in the world. Guests tend to arrive intending to explore Siena, San Gimignano, and the surrounding Chianti countryside, and many do. But the gravitational pull of the estate — the afternoon light across the vineyards, another glass of something cold on the terrace, the absolute absence of any reason to be anywhere else — has been known to rearrange even the most ambitious itinerary