Poggio ai Santi began as an ancient hunting lodge and became, over the years, a working organic farm on a hill above San Vincenzo, where the Maremma meets the sea. Here the land comes first and hospitality follows — and the best way to understand the place is simply to take part in it. Through the season, the week settles into a gentle rhythm of hands-on experiences, each one rooted in the garden, the cellar and the coast around us.
It often begins in the kitchen. In our cooking classes you cook with whatever the orchard and vegetable garden are giving that week — catching the micro-season at its peak and turning it into something simple and good. It is less a performance than a conversation about produce, memory and the short distance between soil and plate.
Other mornings start outside. A foraging walk teaches you to read the land and gather what it offers, before an unhurried yoga session on the deck among the olives — the clearest, quietest hour of the day, taken before the heat settles in.
Wine has its own place in the week. One day is devoted to Dievole, the historic Chianti Classico estate — sister to nearby Tenuta Meraviglia — and its organic wines; another to a tasting on the estate itself, pouring the bottles of this stretch of coast. Either way the idea is the same: to taste a landscape, slowly, in good company.
As the light softens, the fire is lit at il Salotto and the evening turns to just-caught fish, garden herbs and Tuscan wine — Balur at the grill, no rush and no ceremony, the Tyrrhenian dusk doing the rest.
And then there is the land itself. On our green tour — a guided walk through the farm —you meet the free-roaming animals, the research projects and the organic gardens that feed everything we do, learning how biodiversity becomes flavour. We close the week with the thing we are perhaps proudest of: a guided tasting of our extra-virgin olive oil, the ‘liquid gold’ pressed from our own trees.
None of this is entertainment bolted onto a holiday. Our three quiet pillars — harmony, a love of beautiful and good things, and quality — run through every experience, and each one helps sustain the larger project of caring for this land. Experiences run weekly through the season, in small groups and by reservation; you will find the current month’s dates on our calendar, or simply ask us at reception.