Here is where to stay on the ancient stretch of Italian coastline that people in the know are calling 'the new Amalfi'

In early summer, wind cools the sliver of coastline that connects Fonteblanda and Porto Santo Stefano in south-west Tuscany. In the crescent-shaped bay, the water is whipped up into one million tiny stiff peaks and windsurfers take to their narrow boards. On land, the wind is tamer, reduced to little more than a whisper by the thousands of pine trees that stand sentry on the land’s edge, their sharp needles littering the sandy and rocky beaches below.

Villa Talamo hides behind automatic gates at the end of a dirt track, somewhere towards the north end of the bay. It is a stark, but handsome, burned-butter building with teal shutters and once operated as a Benedictine monastery. It was built, in the 18th century, by someone whose brother built an identical version several hundreds of meters away and when the wind blows just right, parting the trees just so, it is possible to snatch a glimpse of it. A small chapel, consecrated in 1831 and a part of the original structure, survives, its walls adorned with white, glossy ribbons — though it's now mostly used as storage space.

Talamo’s current owner is a Milanese man called Massimiliano Zampolli, who took it on from his parents who had, for a time, run it as a bijou hotel. In 2020, Italy was badly hit by the pandemic, and so Massimiliano decamped to the coast and relative freedom of the 10-acre estate with his young family. He began to make changes: landscaping the garden with delicate beeblossom, fragrant lavender, hardy rosemary, and striking purpletop vervain; installing a sleek infinity-style swimming pool that, if viewed from the right angle, blends seamlessly into the Tyrrhenian Sea just beyond it; and gently updating the understated interiors that were originally decorated by a close and talented friend of his father. Lucrezia Cembran Gaetani, Massimiliano’s wife and a Taschen ambassador, curated the selection of excellent books in a snug room off the central, high-ceilinged living room. The tomes vary wildly in topic — from a history of the grand tour, to Helmut Newton, to motorcycles and the complete works of Pieter Bruegel — and rest, among objets, on pistachio-cream coloured shelves. A Wilbur Smith novel hides somewhere close to the top. As of this year, Talamo is available to rent exclusively through The Thinking Traveller and sleeps up to 20 people in 10 bedrooms.

The villa takes its name from the nearby village of Talamone, which history shows has been flourishing since the Etruscan period (900-27BC). That ancient civilisation sprawled across swathes of modern-day Italy and all of Corsica, but was eventually subsumed by the Roman Republic. Ironically its people constructed the first elements of Rome’s infrastructure, including its drainage system. Though just a city, Rome under the Roman Republic asserted its authority with such immense strength and left such a longstanding legacy that the history of so many of its victims, including the Etruscans, has been obscured.

Thankfully, some remnants of Etruscan civilisation survive here, such as in Scansano where a settlement was discovered in 1973 and subsequently excavated, and in Pitigliano, home to a mysterious network of Etruscan-era sunken roads, carved into the tuff (porous rock). In Italian, the roads are known as via cave (above) and the web connecting Scansano to Pitigliano, and the villages in between, is one of the oldest and most intact examples. Historians still understand little about them beyond how they were constructed (a laborious technique first seen in Ancient Egypt), but they likely have ties to death. What we know about the Etruscans comes largely from their elaborate tombs, thousands of which improbably survived the ravages of time. Some were made of painted wood, and others carved out of stone. Some sat above ground and some were buried underneath it. And sometimes the Etruscans built necropolises, filled with gold and food for safe passage to the afterlife — including here, where the tombs for families or individuals are hewn into the tall and vertical walls.

Other close-by villages include Orbetello, flanked by the sea on one side and a lagoon on the other (try the pastries at Ferrini), and Porto Santo Stefano, which along with Porto Ercole make up the Monte Argentario, a peninsula attached to the mainland by three, finger-thin, manmade spits of land. Giglio, an volcanic islet with clear water that is as lovely to visit as it is to say, lies 11 miles out to sea (above). In recent years, the area has attracted wise travellers who used to holiday on the Amalfi coast. In it, they recognise an unpretentious sort of glamour that once characterised that stretch of coastline in southern Italy now overwhelmed by tourism. Earlier in the year, Harry Styles was photographed in Santo Stefano and is long-rumoured to own a house nearby.

Villa Talamo’s best bedroom is called Isola Rossa and is sequestered away in a tower. It comprises a double bed, en-suite bathroom with a bathtub and, on a mezzanine floor, the house’s highest point, a single bed, suitable for children. One floor down are bedrooms Argentario and Gorgona, linked by a secondary kitchen and living room, and perfectly placed above giant, almost obscene, profusions of frothy jasmine plants. In the evening, the heavy scent snags on the day’s last raspy breaths of wind and blows through open windows.

However, the villa’s best kept secret is a cupboard under the stairs on the ground floor — next to the kitchen in which kind staff produce simple dishes typical to the region (wild boar ragout; marinated anchovies). The cupboard is full, top to bottom, with a staggering assortment of pretty, patterned tablecloths, napkins, candlesticks, plates and more — and every evening, an artfully arranged tablescape appears as if by magic on the gargantuan table some way from the house underneath a canopy of pines, palms, cypresses and wild olive trees. On my 33rd birthday there was a dove grey toile de jouy tablecloth, pale pink taper candles and posies of candy-coloured roses and giant daisies. I don’t think the Etruscans would’ve recognised the dulcet tones of ‘Happy Birthday’, but the haunted whoops of Eurasian scops owls, who joined in from hidden perches somewhere in the foliage above, might have sounded more familiar.

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Villa Talamo is available to rent from £26,801 a week. Visit The Thinking Traveller website for more information and to book.