Welcoming someone, for us, means making every guest part of the story of this place.
In 2014 Bruno and Marisella Batinti found the remains of an old Olivetan abbey, founded by seven Benedictine friars from the monastery of San Secondo on Isola Polvese. Sienese red brick, centuries of history and nobody living in it. The restoration kept the soul of the place where it was: exposed beams, terracotta floors, the friars' old cells turned into bedrooms, the refectory turned into the restaurant's Sala Grande.
Today Le Torri di Porsenna is a charme and wellness agriturismo with a spa, pools in the gardens, a kitchen tied to local produce and a park that opens onto the Val di Chiana. Bruno looks after the running of the estate and the projects on it. Marisella looks after the welcome, the feel of the rooms and the details that make guests feel they are in a house rather than a hotel.
L'Almanacco comes out of that. It is the same advice they give guests over breakfast: which island is worth the ferry, which village to go back to, when the lake is at its best and when to stay away. Written down, in five languages, because the audience for an agriturismo on the Umbria-Tuscany border is German, English, French and Spanish at least as much as it is Italian.
The method is the one you use when you live here: write only about what you know first hand, and check every practical detail against an official source before it reaches the page. Where there is no source, the sentence changes.
How we check the articles
- Drive times come from a single table, measured from our own gate, identical in all five languages.
- Opening hours, ferries and festival dates appear only if read on the official source, which is cited at the end of the article.
- No prices: they change, and a stale rate on a page that stays online for years is a broken promise.
- Every article also says at least one thing that is not worth doing, or a time of year when it is better not to come.
