Il Casolare Di Leonardo

We ate at the restaurant, and the food was spectacular, for half the price or less than elsewhere in Italy. Breakfast was exquisite too, just €7. The hotel and restaurant both felt like excellent value, a perfect ten. The family running it were very friendly. Vinci has a museum and Leonardo da Vinci's birthplace, though I didn't think the birthplace was really worth a visit.

We had a beautiful setting in the heart of Tuscany, with good air conditioning. There's a cute little shop selling homemade products and a simple restaurant upstairs, open for dinner from 8 PM. Prices aren't posted there, so we only found out at the end. That meal, two main courses, two sides, and a dessert, cost €55. Breakfast for two cost another €10, though Airbnb said it was included. We were given a bottle of wine as compensation. The booking and communication were a mess. Airbnb showed a kitchen in the room, which mattered to us, and I asked about it through Airbnb beforehand but got no reply. We drove there trusting the listing, then were told no response meant we weren't entitled to a kitchen. They said we should have booked through their own website, where it would have cost more because of the commission, even though they had apparently set that up themselves. They also said contacting us on Airbnb was impossible, despite having sent us two Airbnb chat messages about check-in. We couldn't use the shared kitchen, and had to pay €15 a day to move to a room with a kitchen for six days, €69 in total, though we eventually got a small discount for something that should have been included. Other things made the stay difficult. The roads there are tricky, and the path from our room to breakfast is extremely steep and covered in loose stones. The hosts barely speak English, and when a problem came up they spoke Italian to each other in front of us. The furnishings are very old-fashioned, the kitchen cupboards had few utensils, the shower pressure was poor, the pool was tiny and salty, and the bright white lights in the room were unpleasant. It was also very noisy: workmen in the surrounding rooms could be heard day and night as if they were in our room. Our rooms were linked to other apartments by two locked doors, but it left us feeling that someone might come through at any time. In the mornings, cleaners fiddled with the lock and knocked loudly at 7:30, even though checkout and breakfast ran until 10.

From the farmhouse, a path winds through olive groves and vineyards to the village in under 20 minutes. It was a lovely walk, even with children, and made visiting Vinci easy. The rooms are beautiful, and the owners are kind and helpful. Piastrino farmhouse restaurant is about a five-minute walk away, with truly delicious traditional Tuscan dishes.

The owners welcomed us so warmly that we felt like part of the family right away. A lovely memory of a quiet stay and excellent food.