With the clouds hovering low in the sky, we motored across the brackish Lago di Burano. At the engine, our guide, Uberto Resta Pallavicino, steered us amid the jumping branzini and pointed out the flamingos and herons in the distance. (Yes, flamingos in Italy.) Uberto was taking us to a medieval tower, covered in splotchy lichen, on the opposite shore. As a child, he used to have sleepovers there with his cousins; his family has owned the land that stretches in either direction along the coast for close to a century. On the second floor, there are still some rustic 70s-style futon mattresses built into roughshod beds.
We climbed to the balcony, where my son asked about the holes beneath the parapets. “That’s where they would pour the hot oil,” Uberto explained with a spark in his eye, “when the enemies were approaching.” We walked a bit farther through clusters of prickly juniper and soft white sand dunes and arrived at one of the most stunningly raw stretches of coast I have ever seen—and certainly in Italy, where coastlines can often seem a patchwork quilt of lounge chairs and umbrellas, the shoreline square footage carefully parceled out by the reigning lido or seaside hotel.
Uberto points up the coast, where the peninsula of Monte Argentario juts into the water some 20 miles away. There, the famous Tuscan hotel Il Pellicano, immortalized in Slim Aarons photos of bronzed glitterati lying on the cobblestone patios, offers a very different kind of Italian living. There are no lounging signoras dripping in gold chains, using Fendi scarves as cover-ups, and gossiping behind their supersized sunglasses here. Anticipating a quick boat ride, we have not exactly prepared for a day by the sea, but no matter—my daughter immediately strips off all her clothes and runs into the ocean. Uberto nods in approval; that’s the spirit of this place.
Terre Di Sacra, the multifaceted resort that Uberto runs with Margherita Puri Negri, does inspire a naturalistic abandon, surrounding its guests with the vapors of the past and the wild forces of the wilderness. The tower was once a defense against encroaching enemies on horseback and in armor, but 20th-century history is woven into the origin story of this unique establishment as well.
As the lore goes, Uberto’s grandfather, Marquis Uberto Resta Pallavicino, a World War I officer, was riding the train north from Rome when it came to a halt in what was then the undeveloped swampland of Maremma; he left the train and vowed to do something with the malaria-ridden marsh.
In 1922, with a group of his friends (including an ancestor of Margherita Puri Negri), Uberto’s grandfather purchased 22,000 acres, stretching from the cliffside village of Capalbio to the sea. Years of work followed: transforming a canal system, establishing farmland and pastures for livestock, and insulating the land from the intense pressure of industrialization. In 1967, the first World Wildlife Fund reserve was established on the property, encompassing around 100 acres that surround Lake Burano.
Over the past 30 years, Margherita s parents, Carlo and Giulia Puri Negri, have been restoring and caring for the houses on the property, transforming them into elegant villas and cottages available to rent, dotted along a 12-kilometer stretch of unspoiled coastline. There is even a glamping set-up, where some 40 tents and 24 rustic lodges are nestled amid the dunes and cypress trees, mere meters from the beach, so that guests have the sense they’re enveloped by nature, not by surrounding campers.
After we’d motored back across the lake, we docked at the shore by the charming two-bedroom Cottage dei Papiri, our home for our two-night stay. We’d been warned to watch our footing as we approached; around the lawn, a low-to-the-ground electric cable encircled the house to keep the cinghiale from getting too close at night. (One of these stocky and surprisingly large boars had snuffled vigorously into the beams of our headlights as we rounded a dark Tuscan road earlier that week, so the gentle defense was welcome.) Inside the cottage, it was all cool taupe tones and tasteful elegance, coastal glamour of a laid-back variety.
The next morning, a short run took me past both the unadulterated stretches run by the WWF and a tiled, sunflower-yellow fountain nestled in the farmland—a public art installation from Hypermaremma, the ongoing festival hosted within Terre di Sacra. The art is not so incongruous as it might seem; the town of Capalbio is also home to one of the monumental sculpture gardens by Niki de Saint Phalle, dreamed up while she was institutionalized in her 20s and considered her life’s work. (“It is as if a psychedelic bomb had exploded in the most picturesque part of Tuscany,” wrote Ariel Levy of de Saint Phalle’s garden in 2016.)
The kids were happily watching the birds on the water when I returned, and it seemed as if we could have stayed in the cottage for the rest of our visit. But after a sunny week in the parched center of Tuscany, we—like the metropolitan-seeming Italians we ran into walking their pets along the seaside road—had come for the water. “Have you heard of this charming beach town, Capalbio?” I asked an Italian friend once I had returned to the States. “Of course,” she answered, as though I had asked a New Yorker if she’d heard there were beaches on Long Island.
We drove the short distance down the coast to La Dogana, the beach club within Terre di Sacra, adjacent to the glamping campus. There, a more familiar scene confronted us: umbrellas and loungers neatly arranged, a reservation system parceling them out. The kids made fast work of the morning, burying the most tolerant of their siblings neck-deep in the sand, while my daughter splashed in the waves. I settled on the lounger with a cappuccino and a book, amid the cheery chatter of Italian gossip from the next chair over.
At lunch, we took shelter in the restaurant at La Dogana, where both my barefoot children—peering from behind piled-high, seafood-studded platters of spaghetti—and the elegant ladies in updos seemed equally at home. The pasta disappeared quickly; the warm waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea were calling.
Too soon, we had to pack our bags and go. Remote without being far away, elegant and rustic at the same time—it can be hard to convey the somewhat contradictory charm of Terre di Sacra. We could have stayed for weeks and still felt that we hadn’t truly begun to explore the adventures—horse rides on the beach, nature walks, art adventures, organic farm visits—that the property offers.
But the stay had been planned as something of a stopover, an indulgent rest stop that would allow us to catch our early morning flight back to America, and it was time to make our way to Fiumicino. So we left, feeling despondent at having to abandon a half-eaten jar of honey made from the property s bees—which we had been slathering onto our saltless Tuscan bread each morning—but supremely fortunate to have encountered this strange and magical place.
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