La Bandita Townhouse

A gold disc for The Strokes leans against the stone wall of a Renaissance convent in Pienza, on a run of shelves that also holds Billie Holiday's Lady Day and a turntable. Nuns lived here. John Voigtmann, who owns it, worked in the music industry in New York until he tired, as he puts it, of chasing rock stars around the world; some of them came along in frames. The convent stands on Corso Il Rossellino, the pedestrian street from the town gate to the cathedral square, and its stone front was left alone, so from outside it passes for one more house in the row. Inside are twelve rooms under wood-beamed ceilings, some with a wall of bare stone and white shutters at the window, and the house has a walled medieval garden of its own.

Recommended for anyone who would rather walk out of the door into a Renaissance town than drive to one, and for families, who get suites sleeping up to five and a babysitter at about €15 an hour. Palazzo Piccolomini and the cathedral are five minutes away on foot, Enoteca di Ghino a couple of minutes, and the hotel lends bicycles free for the Val d'Orcia beyond the town. Montepulciano and Montalcino, for their wine cellars, are twenty to thirty minutes by car, and the car waits outside the walls, since none may enter the old town. Dinner is at the hotel's Townhouse Caffè, where David Mangan cooks seasonal Tuscan food. In every room the minibar is free, and so is the espresso machine, which settles the first decision of the morning.