Best Hotel Bets

The Best Luxury Hotels

• Hotel Helvetia & Bristol (Florence; tel. 888/770-0447 in the U.S.): This most central of Florence's luxury addresses was the city's leading hotel in the 19th century, and guest rooms and lounges still exude an opulent turn-of-the-20th-century air. The bright and refreshing small Winter Garden bar, with trailing ivy and a splashing fountain, doubles as the breakfast room.
• Hotel Regency (Florence; tel. 055-245-247): The cozy wood reading rooms, crowded with antique furnishings, feel like a bit of old England. The service is some of the best and most discreet in the city, and the restaurant is the justifiably famous Relais le Jardin -- Tuscan food from the kitchen of a master chef. Guest rooms are somewhat modernized, but marble-clad bathrooms and daily fresh fruit and newspapers in your room add to the prevailing quiet comfort.
• Villa Vignamaggio (Chianti; tel. 055-854-661): Leonardo da Vinci might have approved of the saturated color schemes in the minisuites of this agriturismo (working farm) high in the hills of the Chianti. In fact, the Mona Lisa who sat for his famous portrait grew up in the villa. Most suites are in the peasant stone outbuildings scattered across the property and come outfitted with minibars, satellite TVs, and complimentary bottles of the estate's award-winning vintage. It's the best base for a wine-buying trip.
• Grand Hotel & La Pace (Montecatini Terme; tel. 0572-9240): The most elegant old-world hotel in a town full of 19th-century bastions of grandeur, the Grand has coffee lounges as big as ballrooms and dripping with stuccoes and chandeliers. In the 2-hectare (5-acre) private park are clay tennis courts, several pools, and jogging paths. It offers the full array of services, amenities, and facilities you'd expect from the leading inn of a famed spa town.
• Hotel Il Chiostro di Pienza (Pienza; tel. 0578-748-400): This former 15th-century Franciscan convent in the middle of tiny Pienza has been the best hotel in southern Tuscany since it opened in 1993. Some rooms have 19th-century frescoes; in another wing, rooms feature exposed stonework and big ol' peasant wood furnishings. The restaurant, which is located on a panoramic gravel terrace in summer, is highly recommendable as well.
• Hotel Gattapone (Spoleto; tel. 0743-223-447): This hotel comprises a cluster of tiny 17th-century buildings huddled on the brink of a sheer ilex-covered slope. The secluded Gattapone, just a short stroll from Spoleto's Duomo, is completely surrounded by nature. The stone-silled picture windows of the spacious guest rooms open onto the monumental green of a wooded mountain that's been sacred since Roman times.
• Fonte Cesia (Todi; tel. 075-894-3737): This hotel melds 13th-century palazzo and modern lines. The public rooms are filled with brick vaulting, and the huge terrace, planted with palms, is for taking breakfast. The suites are each themed and decorated with fine antique pieces or modern design, such as Empire-style desks and dressers or Wassily chairs.

The Moderately Priced Hotels

• Pensione Maria Luisa de' Medici (Florence; tel. 055-280-048): This hotel's owner collects both baroque art and modern design, so the halls are hung with museum-quality Vignale and Van Dyck, and the rooms are furnished with classics of 1950s design. You also get a full breakfast served in bed. Did I mention it's as central as you can get in Florence?
• Hotel Torre Guelfa (Florence; tel. 055-239-6338): The name is apt for a hotel that incorporates the tallest privately owned tower in the city and is set in the medieval streets near the Ponte Vecchio. When you tire of sipping aperitivi on top of the 13th-century tower, with its 360-degree panorama of the city, you can retire to your canopied bed or follow the wafting classical music to the long Renaissance-style lounge.
• Morandi alla Crocetta (Florence; tel. 055-234-4747): One of the most genteel and hospitable of Florence's hotels, the Morandi is set in a 1511 convent. You feel as if you're guests in the palazzo of some absentee well-off Florentine family from the 1800s. Each room is decorated with a shrewd eye to keeping the late Renaissance alive, with exposed brickwork and the occasional 16th-century fresco. Most hotels like this charge up to three times as much. Book early.
• Antica Torre (Siena; tel. 0577-222-255): The rooms here are small but soothing, with light-gray stone accents and hand-hewn wood ceilings that hearken back to the building's history as a tower house in the 1500s. The tiny brick breakfast room is actually a potter's workshop from the 14th century. The friendly family that runs the hotel only adds to the atmosphere.
• L'Antico Pozzo (San Gimignano; tel. 0577-942-014): This is San Gimignano's premier hotel, set in a restored 15th-century palace built into the palazzo where Dante stayed during his diplomatic visit to town. Inquisition trials are no longer held here, but you can get an enormous junior suite with a canopied bed or 17th-century frescoed ceilings, or a top-floor double with views of the city's towers.
• Hotel Royal Victoria (Pisa; tel. 050-940-111): Pisa's first hotel is still run by the same family that founded it in 1839 -- now in its sixth generation. The rooms of this rambling palazzo are romantically worn, but many have 19th-century frescoes or look out over the Arno.