Tuscany, Italy

Tuscany has long inspired artists throughout the ages and now in its Unesco-protected heart lies a private golf course on the 800-year-old Castiglion del Bosco estate.

South of the city of Siena, with its famed grey marble Torre del Mangia tower elegantly overseeing its Tuscan surrounds, is the land of Val d’Orcia. For centuries, this has been where crops were grown, livestock fed well, Sangiovese vines thrived and, famously, Renaissance painters took inspiration. So prized were the lands, at the height of Siena’s golden age, in the 14th and 15th centuries, it was enveloped into the republic.

But while Siena’s power has long since waned, the paintings of its agricultural hinterland – images of rolling patchwork Tuscan, the sun forever changing the scene – have proven to be timeless enough to earn Val d’Orcia protected status from UNESCO.

It's a setting so spectacular it’s being preserved for future generations and within these lands sits a 5,000-acre, 800-year-old Italian estate, Castiglion del Bosco, where castle ruins, a medieval church, a historic village and now also home to a hotel recently voted the best in the world, an award-winning winery and a private golf course delicately crafted by Tom Weiskopf and guaranteed to inspire the artist within all of us.

The estate has been transformed in the past two decades, the course only opened in 2012, but using the lightest of touches, to ensure the hotel – a Rosewood – together with its spa, tennis courts, cookery school, and winery have been enveloped within its Tuscan land to blend in rather than standout. “The rolling hillsides provided a perfect palette to lay out the golf course,” said Weiskopf.

Visit Castiglion del Bosco in September or October, and you can get involved in the Tuscan harvest, when the region’s famed Sangiovese grapes are taken from their vines to make their famed reds.