La Dolce Vita! Stunning villa, beautiful surroundings.

Sogni dei Santi is a beautifully restored hilltop villa combining the best of modern design with real creature comforts.

The house sleeps 14 across 7 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, with stunning views over unspoilt valleys and hills, a large private garden, a private outdoor pool with a pool house, and a large outdoor seating area under a shady vine. Set beneath a 12th-century watchtower, in a secluded position surrounded by fields and woods, it enjoys lovely views throughout.

The ground floor has a large, fully equipped modern kitchen with two ovens, a US-style fridge-freezer and a seating area, a large sitting room with TV/video/DVD, a dining room seating 14, a home office with super-high-speed WiFi for anyone wanting to work away from home, plus a laundry and entrance hall.

The first floor has three double bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, and a twin and another double bedroom sharing a bathroom. Up a spiral staircase under the eaves, the second floor has a further double room, a twin room (with restricted headroom), and a bathroom.

Contactless check-in is available, with access to a local Italian property manager who knows the house well and is on call for any issues — many questions are also covered in the property handbook. Routine pool checks happen during your stay with minimal disruption; the pool has a diving board. There’s a large, airy pool house with a ping-pong table and comfy sun loungers, and a gardener visits weekly to mow the lawn and handle general maintenance.

Additional services on request: meet-and-greet and emergency assistance in English, a cook and extra cleaning, and babysitting. The garden has automatic irrigation, and the hospital is 15 minutes away in San Severino.

Sogni dei Santi sits in an area of outstanding natural beauty, between the mountains and the sea, with marked hiking trails into the nearby mountains — the ancient pilgrim route to Assisi runs through the Aliforni hamlet. The Gola della Rossa-Frasassi National Park (30 minutes away) has towering limestone gorges, home to rare golden eagles, peregrine falcons and eagle owls, plus Italy’s largest and most interesting cave network at Frasassi. The Cistercian Abbey of Fiastra (35 minutes) is an inland nature reserve with a wide variety of animals and rare birds, and the breathtaking Sibillini National Park mountains are an hour away. Monte Conero National Park, just south of Ancona, offers a dramatic, rugged stretch of coastline with secluded beaches and coves, rich birdlife, thousands of maritime plant species, stunning sea views, and European Blue Flag beaches.

Le Marche sits at the meeting point of northern and southern Italian culinary traditions, with a huge range of local food — from truffles, mushrooms, salami and porchetta in the mountains to the more delicate coastal flavours like brodetto del mare. Large, juicy olives are another regional specialty, and of course Italian gelato is not to be missed. Vine cultivation here dates back to Roman times, with 24,000 hectares still under vine today, a third of it DOC. The region’s most famous DOC wine is Verdicchio, a white produced in Jesi and Matelica (30 minutes away), alongside excellent reds like Rosso Conero, Rosso Piceno and Lacrima di Morro d’Alba, plus good sparkling wines and spirits.