La Monastica Resort & Spa

La Monastica Resort & Spa

The medieval village of Buggiano Castello occupies a hilltop in the Valdinievole, between Lucca and Pistoia, ringed by walls the da Buggiano family raised in the eleventh century, and at its northern edge is the former Monastery of Santa Scolastica, founded by the Buggiano community council in 1517, expanded by the architect Ferdinando Pacini in 1881 (a loggia, a bell tower, an enlarged church), handed between Franciscan friars and Benedictine nuns through the early twentieth century, and left closed for the better part of thirty years before the Arrighetti family, led by Stefania Arrighetti, began a restoration in 2005 that ran nearly two decades. It reopened in August 2024 as a nineteen-room resort, nine of its terraces stepping down the hillside in a garden plan first laid out around the year 1000, the whole operation now run day to day by the general manager Gianfilippo Mancioli, a Montecatini native building his first hotel from scratch. The rooms, spread between Deluxe categories of 25 to 32 square metres and suites up to 52, keep their wood-beamed ceilings and exposed stone, with furniture made by local artisans and each of the four named suites, La Papessa, La Priora, La Castellana and La Badessa, referencing a different rank of the monastery's old hierarchy (La Castellana has a private terrace and tower access, its headboard modelled on a crown once worn by da Buggiano noblewomen; La Badessa has a hydromassage pool and a freestanding tub in its own garden). Guests who want more independence can take one of the Heritage Homes in the village itself. Dinner happens in the deconsecrated church and sacristy, now the Devoti restaurant, where the chef Igor Rosi, who grew up nearby in Monsummano and spent eight years cooking at a Rocco Forte hotel in Brussels before coming home, built a tasting menu around what grows in the resort's own kitchen garden on the banks of the Cessana stream, plus meat, fish and cheese from small local producers; the restaurant earned a Michelin Key within its first year. The spa runs its water through the Paradiso dell'Anima, a route that begins at the base of a medieval tower beside a well dug in 1610, past a sauna and a Turkish bath and pools of micronized water, into two outdoor pools set among the terraces. What it feels like is a village within a village, quiet enough that a Bovis biometer reading (the resort's own instrument, not independently verified) is offered as evidence of unusual energy at two points inside the property, one in the old church, one in the spa, on the theory that Buggiano sits along the same ley line as Mont Saint-Michel and Skellig Michael. Whether or not you buy the geomancy, the effect on the ground is the same: a place that asks you to slow down because there is very little to do quickly. It suits a couple who want two or three days of not much beyond long breakfasts, a massage, dinner at a fixed hour, and a walk through a car-free village that still looks the way it did five hundred years ago. It does not suit anyone hoping to bring the kids along for a splash in a big pool (the two here are modest, and the uneven medieval stone is not built for buggies or bad knees) or anyone chasing a party scene, though the hotel does host weddings and private events, so worth checking the calendar if total quiet is the point of the trip. You should not come if you need a resort with scale, level ground, or a nightlife beyond the loggia bar. You should come for a nineteen-room monastery with its own kitchen garden, a Michelin Key kitchen inside a deconsecrated church, and a restoration two decades in the making that never tried to disguise what the building used to be. The short version: A restored sixteenth-century monastery above the Valdinievole with 19 rooms and suites, a Michelin Key restaurant in the old church, and nine terraced gardens laid out a thousand years ago.