June 17, 2009

Europe | Italy | Florence

The A&K Code to Tuscany

By Mark Jolly

Think you know Florence? Let Abercrombie & Kent lead you down the city's secret passageways.
Originally published on December 20, 2007.

view map

If there’s one place in Italy where you want your itinerary tailored and your villa private, it’s Tuscany. Abercrombie & Kent’s latest addition to their portfolio of Tuscan lodgings is Villa Lilli, also called Villa Pini for the pine groves that surround the secluded compound in the Fiesole hills. The four-bedroom hideaway is barely a 10-minute drive from the center of Florence, yet worlds apart from the mayhem that descends on Italy’s fabled art town. Bridging the chasm is A&K’s carte-blanche access to a Florence most tourists never get to glimpse. For example, you can skip the four-hour wait at the Uffizi — Europe’s de facto temple of renaissance culture — and get a specialized guided tour of your Botticelli’s, Caravaggio’s and da Vinci’s. Plus, you get a private entrée to the normally off-limits Vasarian Corridor, which snakes through a back passage of the museum, skirts the Ponte Vecchio, and winds up at the Boboli Gardens of the Pitti Palace — built by Bernardo Buontalenti, who besides being an eminent architect, engineer and mathematician, is said to have invented ice cream in 1565.

Since globorati was in the hometown of gelato, we also took a behind-the-scenes peak with A&K into how the stuff is made. With all the requisite diligence for such gastronomic fieldwork, we hit the kitchen at Vivoli, a Florentine gelateria still making ice cream the artisanal way. Which is to say: no flavorings (only fresh fruits), no powders (only fresh milk and cream), and no syrups. (Charlatan gelato warning: if the pistachio looks green or the banana yellow, you’re eating junk.) Vivoli’s nocciola and crema (not to be confused with vanilla) could seriously lay claim to the best in Florence — even though Vivoli’s archrival, Perchè No, might have something to say about that.