Hotel Centro Florence

Arezzo, Italy: Peace and Piero in Tuscany

For those who have finished with Florence, and want to explore the rest of Tuscany, the classic traveller's route runs either due south – to the vineyards of Chianti, the towers and Palio of Siena and San Gimignano, the hill towns between Montalcino and Montepulciano – or west to Pisa, Lucca and the coast. Aside from Cortona – a lovely town popularised, and in high season very nearly ruined, by Frances Mayes's well-meaning memoir Under the Tuscan Sun – eastern Tuscany gets far less attention.

That is a huge bonus for those who do make it to the region's vibrant little capital, Arezzo, just an hour by train from Florence. They come to this half-forgotten corner, in steady but never excessive numbers, drawn mostly by the joyful frescoes of the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca, and discover a city rich in art and architecture but mostly free of crowds.

As well as being an attraction in its own right, Arezzo is also the jumping-off point for the Casentino valley, an area dotted with Romanesque chapels, medieval castles – one of which hosted Dante – and good restaurants. Two important Franciscan sites, the monasteries of La Verna and Camaldoli, lie high in the wooded mountains that ring the valley.

Arezzo

Eastern Tuscany's main provincial capital is a bit of a diamond in the rough. Economic prosperity (the town is one of the main centres of Italy's gold jewellery industry) has given it a halo of light industry and ring-roads, but once you get past the outer gauntlet, what a good-looking centro storico it has.

Add some fine restaurants and wine bars, and the presence of what is arguably the single most essential artistic draw in the whole of Tuscany – Piero della Francesca's Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle – and it's a must on any Tuscan road or railway trip.

Its historic heart is, at first, hard to read, because where you would normally expect the town centre to be – at the high point where the main roads converge – lies a placid municipal park, with the ruins of the Medici fortress on one side, the Duomo on the other, and the countryside stretching away below and beyond.

Florence Luxury Hotel

What to Do When You Have No Time to Think

On a recent hectic business trip to Florence, I lucked out; my client booked me into the Four Seasons. The hotel consists of two restored Renaissance palaces, separated by 11 acres of garden. I was thrilled.

That is, until I arrived and saw that my room was in the more distant building. Every time I entered the hotel, I had to walk the length of the garden to my room.

My days were jam-packed with consulting, and I still had all my other work to take care of. That long, forced walk was going to steal valuable time in my day, time I could scarcely afford.

At first I entered the garden annoyed and walked through with speed and determination. But, to my surprise, each time I walked through the garden, I walked a little more slowly. Eventually, that garden walk became a transformative experience. As I meandered along the winding paths, my mind began to wander too, making connections, drawing insights, and developing ideas.

In our fast-paced, productivity-focused lives and workplaces, we are losing our gardens — literally and figuratively. We need to reclaim them.

I had lunch recently with Rajip, the Chief Technology Officer of a large investment bank. When we returned to his office after spending an hour together, he had received 138 new email messages. As we talked, the email dings kept ringing out. “How can I possibly keep up?” he asked me.

He can’t. Rajip has close to 10,000 employees in his group. “I have no time to think,” he complained to me.

I have no time to think. Possibly the six scariest words uttered by a leader. But they don’t scare us anymore because they are so commonplace. We don’t need 10,000 employees to feel too busy to think. Almost all of us feel the same way.