Checking into another century: Castello di Reschio

The century starts to shift somewhere on the road up. First the villages peel away, then the farmhouses, and by the time the road to Reschio begins climbing between the cypress, the only other traffic is the estate's own Range Rovers coming the other way.

Reschio lies midway between Florence and Rome, crowning the hills on the Umbrian border above the Niccone Valley. The castle is the centrepiece, but around it stretches an entire private world, all of it belonging to the Bolza family: oak forests and open meadows, stables filled with Spanish horses, a lake, a tennis court, and kilometres of walking trails that disappear into the hills.

At the castle gates, a staff member is waiting in old-fashioned livery, hand-tailored to a pattern the family had made in Italy. He takes the keys to our hire car and drives it out of sight (the way I imagine somebody would once have taken your horse), and we walk through the iron gates into the stone turret.

The key we're handed at the door of our ground-floor room is electronic. The room it opens has walls close to two metres thick and all the quirks of a medieval floor plan - a ceiling that still follows the line of the original stonework, a window set low in the wall where an archer once kept watch.

Everything else is exactly as new as the key in my hand: velvet and heavy linen against chrome, marble and blackened metal, almost all of it made by the family's own design studio. Nine centuries of noble families passed through here before the Bolzas bought the estate in 1994, and Count Benedikt Bolza, an architect, spent three decades putting it back together stone by stone before opening it as a hotel in 2021.

Later, after a drink at the Palm Court Bar, we walked five minutes down to Ristorante Alle Scuderie. A few steps from the stables, it borrows their scale without feeling at all rustic, with soaring ceilings, antique saddles on the walls and an oversized marble bar. Our table outside had been timed for sunset, and the light was already going amber over the valley as we sat down. We ordered what we were told not to miss (the truffle pasta and the steak if you are curious), alongside a wine chosen by our sommelier. Many of the ingredients, we learned, had been grown or reared on the estate, with the truffle from the same oak forests we'd driven through that afternoon.

We came down to the stables the next morning to find the horses already out. The Bolzas have kept a working stud at the Teatro Equestre since 1999, breeding and schooling around 40 pure-bred Spanish horses to competition standard. Grooms were bathing and brushing one, a rider was working a stallion through its paces in the ring, and others had been turned loose to gallop in the meadow beyond. Even if you never plan to get in the saddle, the stables are worth the visit on their own. A riding lesson is the first thing on my list for when I go back.

Reschio has all the theatre of a thousand-year-old castle - the livery, the horses, the iron gates. You check into another century and are handed every comfort of this one.