Camaiore holiday chateau / country house: Camaiore

The house was in a beautiful setting, at the end of a narrow road in the green hills behind Camaiore. As we arrived we found the house manager Victoria waiting for us on the extensive terracota tiled patio. She was most welcoming and showed us around explaining where everything was and how everything worked. The living room was pronounced charming and the kitchen the most well equiped we had evern seen (though still not sure why anyone would need 6 expresso pots)

After this everyone rushed to lay claim to one of the lovely clean light and airy bedroooms. As shutters in various rooms were thown open ,gasps of delight could be heard as people found they were either looking up into the mountains or down the valley to Camaiore and beyond to the sea. The inside of the house was declared delightful and stuffed to the gills with "old world charm"

As we gathered out on the huge patio set with table and chairs for outside dining and adorned with orange and lemon trees in outsize pots we made plans for the evening. My Italian speaking friend and myself were elected to go and find a takeaway pizzeria and wine down below in the town. We found both and after being both fed and watered went to our extremely comfortable beds and slept like babies.

The next day we made our 20 minute journey to the seaside where our delightful "Bagno" had been pre-booked, spent the day on the beach, swimming snoozing and reading and we returned to La Villa in the late evening after a lovely meal in Camaiore,. We sat on the patio and watched a fire work display going on somewhere in the valley, waited for the stars come out and then went happily to bed.

This was our routine more or less for the whole week. This was only vairied by a trip to Viareggio to "the best icecream shop in Italy" and to assorted restaurants at the sea and in the courntry. Oh and the morning we managed to lock ourselves out and Victoria had to come and rescue us (we were a little late getting to our deckchairs that day)

We could have gone to look at medieval churches, we could have gone to listen to opera at the Puccini festival, we could have gone into The Marble Mountains, to Lucca, to the Cinque Terre or done a thousand other things, all of which we intended to do. But, we didn't do any of these things because the house, the town, the sea all enchanted.

A perfect week for 5 busy stressed out women and one young boy

Would we go again, yes we most certainly would!