International Women's Day: Good strong women are the linchpin of my world – let's celebrate them (and fuck yeah we need a day!)
For Tracey, there's no better way to celebrate female friendship than by drinking endless bellinis and cackling like crows in Tuscany.
I'm sitting under the fragrant, wisteria-drenched pergola at Casa Lucii winery with a bunch of great women. Overlooking the very vines from which it comes from, we're sipping Lorenzo's most excellent Spicchio rosé and discussing the, ahem, artistic merits of Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born. Platters of oil-drenched artichokes, sunshine-infused tomatoes, creamy mozzarella and bitey pecorino appear before us, as Lorenzo flutters around topping up our glasses. I do believe this is what the Italians call la dolce vita.
A holiday with a gang of good girlfriends is a god-tier vacation. An entirely different experience to one with a partner or a family. For a start, there's a distinct absence of duty – you're not a wife, a mother or a daughter, you're a friend and with this eases any pressure for things to be absolutely perfect. Instead a holiday becomes solely about relaxing and reconnecting with your friends.
Looking at the six women sat around the long table – Rhonda, Teresa, Amy, Laura, Hannah and Mary – who I've collected over decades. Listening to them at ease with each other with their lively chatter, clinkity-clink of wine glasses and regular snorts of laughter, it feels like balm to my soul. Lorenzo grins and says there's a saying in Italy, 'il dolce far niente', which means the pleasing sweetness of doing nothing. And with good friends, this sounds like a heavenly way to spend a week.
Over the past couple of years, several of us have had significant birthdays – I turned fifty in December – without a wisp of celebration thanks to the you-know-what. But now that the world is opening up once more, I decided to do it properly and ring in my next half century in style...in Tuscany.
Our home for the week is the magnificent Villa Chiantisol, a sprawling honeyed stone estate near Tavarnelle Val di Pesa. Winding through the undulating Chianti hills, it's a 30-minute drive from Florence – slightly further from Siena – making it the perfect base for a proper Tuscan escape. The fact that we're surrounded by some of the finest vineyards in Italy is merely a happy (hic) coincidence.
On arrival at Villa Chiantisol, we each bag one of the ten beautiful bedrooms – all rugged oak beams, terracotta tiled floors and rustic wooden shutters opening out on those views – before reconvening on the terrace for an Aperol spritz and to toast our life choices.
Tuscany feels like the perfect place to celebrate both the sisterhood and my half-century. Ever since I watched Under the Tuscan Sun, the 2004 movie staring Diane Lane and Sandra Oh and based on the memoir by American author, Frances Mayes, I've hankered to visit. The story follows the recently divorced Frances who comes on holiday to Italy with her best friend to salve her broken heart and impulsively buys a 300-year old villa in Cortona in Tuscany.
It's easily done. And I can certainly see the appeal. Tuscany is like Eden. A rolling panorama of undulating velvet-green hills and corduroy-striped vineyards, its skyline studded with spiky cypress trees and olive groves, and smattered with honeyed stone villas just like this one. “It's all just ridiculously beautiful,” says Amy, who, like me, had never been to rural Tuscany before. “It's like Disney has designed it.” I agree and feel a sudden urge to throw on a hessian smock, pull out an easel and capture its ethereal beauty in oil paint. I can't paint, of course, but this level of natural beauty inspires creativity, it's no wonder the Macchiaioli set – a bunch of 19th century Italian impressionists, including Silvestro Lega and Telemaco Signorini – made Tuscany their muse.
Wandering through the vaulted dining room where Davide and Carlo, our CV Villas hosts for the week, lay out silver platters of pecorino, salami and breads, and pour the Chianti, I hear a distant whoop of joy as my friends discover the spa with a gym, a sauna and a hot tub with views over the hills. Judging by our gleeful reaction, I think Davide and Carlo fear we may never leave.
It's late spring and the weather is warming up nicely across the Chianti region. Often scorchingly hot and overcrowded in the height of summer, Davide assures me that late spring and autumn are the nicest times to visit. After yet another rosé-fuelled lunch grazing on antipasti – pasta doused in fresh pesto, slivers of pecorino and salty prosciutto – outside on the terrace, we kick back for an afternoon by the infinity pool and try to work out a way we can stay forever.
Staring out over the emerald hills, the perfect Pantone-blue sky actually hurting my eyes, I decide that Tuscany is an absolute thirst trap. Rhonda swishes up, a vision in a peach kaftan, with a tray of Bellinis “to rehydrate” and I float the idea of us all clubbing together to buy Villa Chiantisol – where we find the four million euros needed is not a question for today – and all retire here. It's a well-known fact that Italian soil grows magnificent older women like Isabella Rossellini, Sophia Loren and Monica Bellucci, so the general consensus is a Big Fat Yes.
While it's all too tempting to spend the entire week il dolce far niente, lounging around the villa and its extensive grounds, it seems a waste not to explore this corner of Tuscany a little further. One afternoon we drive over to San Gimignano – or San Gimmyjimjams as Teresa, who lived in Tuscany for three months and assures us it's what the locals call it – one of the best-preserved medieval hill towns in Europe. Beyond its 13th-century walls is Piazza della Cisterna, a triangular central 'square' overlooked by the medieval towers the town is famed for. While I'm sniffing out some free samples of Oro di San Gimignano, the aged golden ham the town is also known for, some of the group splinters off to peek into the Duomo di San Gimignano, adorned with frescoes by Ghirlandaio, while others hunt down San Gimmy's best pistachio gelato.
Another day, after a blissful afternoon in the sun, the girls and I reluctantly prise ourselves off the sun-loungers to venture into Florence for the evening. Famously the Cradle of the Renaissance, Florence has attracted art lovers since the heady days of the Grand Tour. Once home to some of the world's greatest artists – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Titian – who all flocked to capture its Gothic-Romanesque beauty in oils and stone.
We wander along the banks of the River Arno, wind our way through Ponte Vecchio, the covered bridge lined with goldsmiths, and over to the Duomo, the city's colossal cathedral with its tricolor marble facade and magnificent red-tiled cupola. Of course, Florence has the best art galleries on the planet. We could have popped into the Accademia, the world's oldest art school where Michelangelo’s David is, ahem, proudly on display. Or witness Botticelli's The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi, however, the clock strikes aperitivo so instead we skip across Piazza della Repubblica and into Caffe Gilli for an Aperol spritz on the terrace. For dinner, Davide suggests we try Casella 18, an utterly charming trattoria on Villa delle Oche which is run by the formidable Laura. We feast of giant bowls of her homemade tagliatelle with wild boar ragu and burrata-topped pizza.
On our last night, Davide and Carlo drive us over to explore another Chianti town – Panzano – where we treat ourselves to dinner at Antica Macelleria Cecchini, the beef restaurant by legendary butcher, Dario Cecchini. Reached through the back of his butcher's shop, this lively, modern restaurant is already a buzz with people. As huge sides of beef roast on the open charcoal grill, we join a communal table adorned with huge, straw-wrapped flasks of Chianti, bags of rustic bread and clay pots filled with crudites. There is no menu, instead the waiters waft around with silver platters doling out the most heavenly beef. We try a soft and delicate steak tartare, slivers of seared carpaccio and slow roasted hunks of rump, served alongside big bowls of buttery fagioli beans drenched in warm olive oil. To finish they bring us a plate of lighter-than-air olive oil cake, espresso and grappa, a fitting farewell to my waistline.
From Bellinis by the pool, wafting glamorously around Florence to laughing like loons on Lorenzo's terrace: with good friends, good food and good wine, I can confirm life post fifty is bellissimo.
AS PUBLISHED IN PLATINUM MAGAZINE