By Julia Buckley – Saturday May 24 2025, 5.00pm BST, The Sunday Times. Full article HERE

The intruders are everywhere at Terre di Sacra. There they are, singing merrily as you wake up. Furtively hopping up the steps to your abode, then scramming once they realise they’ve been busted. Leaving footprints in the sand around your cabin, making it clear whose territory this really is. When I nipped to the beach, I even put my glass of water inside — I just knew they’d snaffle it.

Just as well these aren’t your usual interlopers; in fact the real interlopers are us. Terre di Sacra sits within a wildlife reserve in Maremma, on the coast of southern Tuscany, and the hares, blackbirds, foxes and boars — even the snails drawing curlicues across your terrace in the morning dew — are the ones sharing their habitat with us. They get the florid bushes of macchia, the herb and flower-filled coastal scrub; the trees that double as natural sunshades; the burrows in the metres-deep dunes that ripple along this coastline. We get safari tents and wooden cabins, the swish of the waves never out of earshot.

For anyone who knows Italian beaches, this feels very un-Italian. The Bel Paese has more than 4,500 miles of coastline, but sometimes it feels like most of it has been privatised by the ubiquitous beach clubs: sand raked to within an inch of its life, sunloungers rammed so intimately close that you hear every slap and squelch of sunscreen, and tinny music echoing on the breeze.

But Maremma is different. Here on the border with Lazio is the seaside that modern Italy forgot. There are natural parks where tame foxes stretch into yoga poses roadside. There are forests that give way to thick-sanded beaches. There are villages that crawl up the rockface, each house straining for an ever-more epic view. And there’s this: Terre di Sacra, a 2,500-acre nature reserve that encompasses organic farmland, 7.5 miles of dune-backed beach, a lake that throbs with migratory birds, a World Wildlife Fund oasis, and the accommodation that funds this pristine environment: cottages and villas dotted along the lakefront and this, the glampsite, with cabins in a pine grove and tents amid the dunes.

The cabins are new this year but the project has been a century in the making. In 1922, Uberto Resta Pallavicino, an aristocrat from Lombardy, groaned as his train from Rome broke down in the Maremma wilderness. Yet stepping outside he had a Damascene moment; suddenly, that desolate, swamp-prone plain had become a promised land, full of potential. He rounded up a group of 20 like-minded friends; together they bought 22,000 acres around the hilltop town of Capalbio, roughly from the Lazio-Tuscany border to Ansedonia, a cliff-clinging village dating back to Etruscan times. The land ran the gamut from wild dunes to thickly forested hills, with reclaimed fields in between — marshland turned into farmland in the 1800s through a canal system that the friends would later improve and extend.

They called their estate SACRA: an acronym for their agricultural business, but also the Italian for “sacred” — that promised land that Resta Pallavicino had seen from the train. Today, the name rings truer than ever — crossing into Tuscany, Lazio’s beach resorts dissolve into undulating dunes, fragrant pineforest, fields that alternate wheat with wildflowers, and roads where the other traffic might be a bike or a bunny. It feels heaven-sent.

Of course, everyone wants a piece of heaven, and government land reforms in 1952 whittled the estate down by about 90 per cent. Today it is mostly owned by just two of those original 20, the forward-thinking Resta Pallavicinos and the Puri Negris, who chose to keep the coastal strip. Even more forward-thinking, as the rest of Italy was focusing on industry, they resolved to protect the land. In 1967 they created Italy’s first WWF oasis, 100 acres around Lake Burano that today are home to about 300 species and 500 types of plants. Next, they started quietly renting the estate’s deceptively rustic houses and cottages on the savannah-like plain that unspools towards the lake. For decades, the well-to-do and those in the know have crept here to commune with nature.

Then there are the rest of us. The area in the pine grove at the southern end of the reserve started off as a regular campsite. In 2014 the families introduced glamping, erecting swish safari tents in the dunes. This year, they’ve replaced the pitch-your-own campground with 24 “wooden lodges” — sustainable fir cabins, designed by the Soho Farmhouse architects Michaelis Boyd, each in its own private plot of pine grove, sand underfoot. The vibe is Big Sur meets South America — mid-century-style cabins, their glass frontages melting into the undergrowth. Each has a patio with a sofa, chairs and dining area; mine had a 50ft pine tree blasting through the terrace.

They have memory foam beds, wi-fi, air conditioning, full kitchens and proper plumbing: showers tiled in the colours of the forest or the demerara dunes, flushing toilets (no noisy pumps) and even outdoor bathtubs, and — for the two-bedroom cabins — showers with demure bamboo wraparounds. Eighteen steps lead you into the dunes where 40 safari tents are wedged into the sand — again fully equipped with living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and air conditioning, though you might not need it with the sea breeze. All have sprawling outdoor decks — some are almost buried by the thickets of macchia, others are feet-deep in the dun-coloured sand, overlooking the gloriously sunbed-free beach.

To the south, 30 miles away, is the port of Civitavecchia; northwest is Monte Argentario, an “island” (technically a peninsula) shaped like a giant panettone, welded onto the mainland by two thick sandbars.

It is as bucolic as it sounds. This is a place where everyday life becomes divine — where a good evening means slathering pasta with the homemade ragu left as a welcome gift, made with the meat of Terre di Sacra’s own long-horned Maremmana cows, and enjoying it on the terrace with some local vermentino and a dusk chorus of birds. It’s where walking to breakfast — served at La Dogana, the beachside restaurant run by the two-Michelin-starred Rome restaurant Enoteca La Torre — becomes a nature trail, matching pawprints to the hare you saw skittering into the bush or tracing boar-trotter
imprints through the macchia. It’s where an afternoon out is a trip to the WWF headquarters to follow butterflies through a sylvan glade, past a thicket of reeds and onto the lake, where in summer you might spy herons or flamingos, and in winter the water seems alive with the thousands of birds that migrate here.

The estate is your oyster. You can ride a horse along the beach, follow trails through the dunes to an abandoned 16th-century watchtower on the tongue of land separating lake from sea, cycle the quiet roads or visit the butteri — Maremma’s traditional cowboys — and their bone-white charges. You can spend, as I did, an afternoon eating platters of sublime sushi at Doganino (the international, more informal side of La Dogana — try the moreish cod bao) or make like the hare who once loped into La Dogana to check out the fine-dining menu (if there’s black-garlic pasta on the menu, don’t hesitate — mains from £21; dogana.enotecalatorre.group).

You can scale the hill (by car or ebike) to dinky Capalbio, its pedestrianised streets curled like those Terre di Sacra snails within its medieval walls. The area is an elegant weekend retreat for Romans these days — below the village is a state-of-the-art winery, Monteverro (tastings £76; monteverro.com), and a conversion of an old granary into hipster shops, from a tailor stitching traditional Maremma jackets (their extra-large pockets were for hunting spoils; anticasartoriamaremma.com) to a design boutique selling everything from silk kaftans to Rome-woven rugs (@community-capalbio). Nearby is the Giardino dei Tarocchi, an outré sculpture garden by the 20th-century French artist Niki de Saint Phalle (£12; ilgiardinodeitarocchi.it). Half an hour north on Monte Argentario is Porto Ercole, another quietly glamorous beach town. There are jaw-dropping archaeological sites too — Vulci, Tarquinia and Cosa are all portals to the past within 30 minutes’ drive.

Yet you might just find that the most fascinating thing of all is that portal to Mother Nature. One evening I sat on the beach and watched the sunset drape Monte Argentario in a fiery halo. Another I lay on my cabin patio, reading, as two doves pecked at the sand by my feet. Perhaps it was them serenading me as I showered under the pine tree the next morning. It seemed they didn’t mind interlopers at all.

Five more wild Maremma places

Vulci

Maremma was an Etruscan heartland in pre-Roman times, and Vulci was one of its hubs. Today the city is a nature reserve with ruins that are still being excavated — you’ll walk through the city gates, past a triumphal arch, houses and shops and follow the basalt-paved Roman road down to fields of Maremmana cows, woodland and a waterfall-filled lake.

Pitigliano

“Little Jerusalem” is how Pitigliano is also known, because of the vibrant Jewish community that in the 1500s sought refuge in this town dramatically sculpted from a canyon edge. Although the community was obliterated in the Second World War, you can still visit the cliffside synagogue and try a sfratto, a fruit-and-nut-filled pastry said to be modelled on the stick with which Jews were evicted from their homes.

Cosa

The Romans confiscated this prime clifftop site from the Vulci Etruscans when they beat them in battle; in 273BC they founded their own colony here to keep those knockout views to themselves. Later destroyed by marauding pirates (and, goes the story, a plague of mice), today the ruins have been swallowed by nature. The ancient town gate leads into an olive grove, where ruined houses and the walls of the forum still stand among the trees, and a “sacred way” leads to the inner sanctum of the Capitolium (temple), perched tall on the clifftop. This year the site is home to two sculptures by Hypermaremma, which adds contemporary art installations to the Maremma landscape (including a yellow-tiled cattle fountain at Terre di Sacra).

Monte Argentario

The “mountain” rising out of the Tyrrhenian Sea northwest of Terre di Sacra has something for everyone: chichi resorts such as Porto Santo Stefano and Porto Ercole, where Caravaggio died; cliff-cut roads with views of Giglio Island in the distance; and the wild beach of Feniglia, the sandbar connecting it to the mainland, and part of another WWF reserve. Further north is the Parco Naturale della Maremma, a natural park skimming miles of swimmable coastline.

Tarquinia

The Etruscans knew how to live, if their tombs at Tarquinia are anything to go by. The Monterozzi necropolis has more than 6,000 ancient tombs, including 200 that are painted with vivid scenes of banquets and nature. Towards Rome is the necropolis at Cerveteri, a veritable city of the dead, with tombs laid out in street formation.