Villa Cora

In the late 1860s, while Florence was the capital of Italy, Baron Gustave Oppenheim built a villa for his young bride, Eugenia Fenzi, and then, convinced she was unfaithful, planned to burn it down. The authorities stopped him and made him sell, which was as well. Pietro Comparini and Giuseppe Poggi had given it a white neoclassical front, and the rooms behind it ran to Carrara marble and Murano glass. Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III's widow, owned it next, and in 1894 Egidio Cora gave it the name it still has. In one bedroom, under a painted ceiling, a red velvet four-poster stands on parquet and a rug of roses, with a green velvet sofa near by. Dinner in winter is in the Sala Moresca, under domed ceilings frescoed by Antonio Caremmi; in summer Le Bistrot gives up the frescoes for the pool.

Recommended for anyone who wants a painted ceiling in Florence and a swimming pool too, and for families: the Family Rooms sleep five, and a babysitter can be booked two days ahead. The Boboli Gardens are on the doorstep, the Ponte Vecchio twenty minutes' walk, and the shuttle into the centre is free. The difficulty is getting out of the garden first. It runs to 900 square metres, Italian, with yew and oak and more than a hundred kinds of rose, and the heated pool sits in it with the Santa Garden Cocktail Club mixing drinks alongside. The house itself, building and decor alike, is what guests praise. The last drink belongs on the Bellevue, the terrace on the roof, which looks out over the rooftops of Florence to the hills, from a house that very nearly did not survive its first marriage.