TUSCANY AND UMBRIA WITH SIMPSON TRAVEL BROCHURE

We share a passion for the holiday destinations we offer and the service we want our customers to enjoy. In essence, we are dedicated to offering our clients the type of holiday we ourselves would wish to take.

Villa holidays with a private pool, charming country house hotels and converted farmhouse apartments offer you a wide choice from which to explore the idyllic landscapes and cultural heritage of Italy's heartland.

People gaze, incredulously, at the vivid frescoes in Siena's Piccolomini Library. Surely they have been restored? Amazingly not. Yet they are as fresh as the day they were painted centuries ago. What's more, the Tuscan landscapes in the background are still astonishingly true. Since this enchanted province of Italy seduced the artistic geniuses of the Renaissance - da Vinci, Michelangelo and Botticelli were all born in Tuscany - it has lost none of its potency. In a cultivated idyll of vineyards, olive groves and cornfields, slim cypresses still punctuate the scenery like paintbrushes in-waiting, while ancient farm houses dripping with wisteria lord it on the hilltops.

Neighbouring Umbria has a painterly beauty of its own - significantly, Pinturicchio, the artist responsible for those panels in Siena, was an Umbrian; so was Raphael. With its wooded heights rising from a rustic eiderdown, and craggy outcrops holding aloft wonderful historic towns like Spello, Spoleto and Perugia, this lovely green central region is no less dramatic and in many ways more intensely Italian.

Two wonderful regions brimming with great art and architecture. . . Yet it's the lie of the land itself and the pleasure of being in it that draws visitors back time after time. In the delightful villas and hotels we have selected, from the wine country of Chianti, Montepulciano and Orvieto, to the lakelands of Trasimeno, you'll feel in touch with the spirit of the place the moment you step across any of their thresholds. Here is your own room with a view, your patch on the terrace, your space by the pool. And the locations are so well chosen - hand-picked by someone who knows and loves this part of Italy - that even in the height of summer the peace and perfection of the surroundings remain relatively undisturbed.