Wine Vacation: Sleeping in Amarone Country — Villa Quaranta Tommasi, Valpolicella

Quick Guide — Villa Quaranta Tommasi Wine Vacation

• Where: Ospedaletto di Pescantina, Valpolicella Classica — 20 minutes from Verona, 20 minutes from Lake Garda
• Best for: Wine lovers, couples, anyone who wants to wake up inside Amarone country
• Price range: From around £154 per night for standard rooms, suites considerably more
• Don’t miss: Wine therapy at Terme della Valpolicella, the 1,300-label wine list, Amarone tasting at Tommasi winery, Verona for dinner
• Best time to visit: September–October for harvest season; any time you need a very good reason to drink Amarone before noon
• Written by: Kelly Chidi-Ogbonna, living in the Veneto since 2013 — she knows Valpolicella the way most people know their local supermarket, except considerably more enjoyable

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There are hotel spas and then there is the Terme della Valpolicella.

Most hotel spas give you eucalyptus steam rooms, a swimming pool, and a list of treatments with names like “Serenity Journey” that involve warm stones and someone playing a flute somewhere in the background.

The spa at Villa Quaranta Tommasi gives you an Amarone face scrub in the Turkish bath.

An Amarone face scrub. In a Turkish bath. Using actual Amarone — one of the most prestigious, most complex, most expensive red wines produced in Italy — applied directly to your face while you sit in a cloud of warm steam in the Valpolicella hills.

I don’t know who thought of this. I want to shake their hand.

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What Is Villa Quaranta Tommasi?

Villa Quaranta Tommasi Wine Hotel and SPA sits in the heart of the Valpolicella Classica region — a land rich in history and tradition, in Venetian villas and vineyards, with an excellent wine production covering Valpolicella, Ripasso, Recioto and the star of the show, Amarone.

The villa itself dates back to the 17th century — a proper Venetian noble residence with original frescoes on the walls, antique furniture throughout, and the kind of proportions that make you feel slightly more important than you probably are the moment you walk through the door. Which, honestly, is exactly what a good hotel should do.

But here’s the detail that makes Villa Quaranta different from just another beautiful Italian villa with good beds.

It was born from the passion for hospitality of the Tommasi family — a historical family of winemakers since 1902. The people who own this hotel have been making Valpolicella and Amarone for over a century. The wine isn’t an afterthought on the menu or a regional touch on the welcome card. It is the entire point. The hotel was built around the wine. The spa treatments use the wine. The restaurant has a wine list of over 1,300 labels. The winery is down the road and you can visit it.

You are not staying near a wine region. You are staying inside one, hosted by the family that helped define it.

That is a meaningfully different experience.

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The Rooms — History With Comfortable Beds

Here’s the thing about staying in a 17th century Venetian villa — you half expect the beds to match the era. Ornate, beautiful, and roughly as comfortable as a period drama prop.

They don’t. The beds are excellent. The rooms are air-conditioned, properly modern underneath the antique furniture and original frescoes, and sized generously enough that you don’t spend the whole stay navigating around your own luggage. Small mercies, but important ones.

Prices start from around €154 per night for standard rooms — genuinely reasonable for a four-star property with thermal spa access, a Wine Spectator award-winning restaurant, and the Tommasi wine cellar essentially on your doorstep. The suites step up considerably in both space and price, but even the standard rooms carry that particular Italian quality of making you feel like the building chose you rather than the other way around.

One practical tip: request a recently renovated room when booking. The property has been quietly updating its accommodation and the newer rooms have a fresher feel while keeping all the historic character. Worth a quick note in your booking rather than leaving it to chance.

The grounds deserve their own mention. A beautifully maintained park that includes a charming medieval chapel, a small lake, and an olive grove. I have walked through a lot of Italian hotel gardens that look better in photographs than in person. This one is the other way around — better in person, quieter and more genuinely lovely than any photo suggests. Go for a walk before dinner. You’ll thank yourself.

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The Wine Therapy Spa — Because Normal Spas Are Boring

Let me explain the Terme della Valpolicella properly because it deserves more than a passing mention.

The pride of Villa Quaranta is the Terme della Valpolicella — a 2,500 square metre area of style and wellness where salso-bromo-iodine thermal water is the main protagonist of special and exclusive treatments: thermal swimming pools, sauna-thermarium area, fitness area, and beauty centre.

So far, impressive but not entirely unexpected for a high-end Italian resort.

Then comes the wine therapy.

The Wine SPA Experience is a journey through the sauna-thermarium area enhanced by wine-therapy products made with Valpolicella and Amarone wines and their hydrating, revitalizing and antiaging properties. Try the Finnish sauna with red grapes, the Amarone face scrub in the Turkish bath, and the Valpolicella leg cream before entering the Kneipp path.

Finnish sauna with red grapes. Amarone face scrub. Valpolicella leg cream.

I have been to a lot of spas. I have never been to a spa where the treatment menu reads like a wine list. This is genuinely new territory and I am entirely here for it.

You can also soak in a mosaic extra-large bathtub with thermal water and grape seed oil, or let yourself be pampered with a massage and a final treat by the Tommasi family.

A bathtub with grape seed oil. In Valpolicella. The Tommasi family have clearly thought very carefully about what it means to make guests feel like they’re inside the wine rather than just drinking it, and the answer they arrived at is: put the wine on their faces and in their bath water.

This is correct.

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The Wine — Obviously, The Wine

A wine list with more than 1,300 labels, honoured by Wine Spectator with two glasses for five years in a row, sits in the Borgo Antico Restaurant — the formal dining room inside the 17th-century villa, with the kind of ceiling and proportions that make you instinctively sit up straighter before you’ve even ordered.

1,300 labels. In a restaurant. In the middle of Valpolicella.

If you cannot find something you want to drink on that list, I genuinely cannot help you.

The Cantina in Villa is the more casual wine experience — the estate’s own cellar, where you can taste through the Tommasi range in the kind of stone-vaulted space that makes wine taste better simply by existing. The Bottega del Gusto combines wine tasting with food pairings — Amarone with aged cheese, Ripasso with cured meats, Valpolicella with whatever the kitchen is doing that day.

All of it, every glass, in the valley where the grapes were grown. That’s not a detail — that’s the whole point.

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What to Do — Beyond the Spa and the Wine Cellar

Visit the Tommasi Winery — the family’s main winery is nearby and visits can be arranged through the hotel. A wine tasting at the Tommasi winery, the ambassador of Amarone wine in the world, will be a unique territorial, cultural and sensorial experience.This is not a tourist trap experience. This is a working winery that has been making Amarone since 1902 opening its doors to guests who actually want to understand what they’re drinking. Do it.

Drive the Valpolicella valley — the hills northwest of Verona are quieter, less obviously scenic than the Prosecco hills but in their own way more interesting. Ancient stone villages. Small churches. Terraced vineyards on every slope. The kind of landscape that rewards slow driving and sudden stops.

Verona for dinner — twenty minutes from Villa Quaranta and one of Italy’s most beautiful cities. Go for dinner. Eat in the old city. Walk back through the Piazza Bra at night when the Roman Arena is lit up and the restaurants are still full and the whole thing feels faintly unreal. It’s twenty minutes away. There is no excuse not to go at least once.

Lake Garda — equally twenty minutes in the other direction. Villa Quaranta allows you to easily reach Lake Garda, the centre of Verona, and famous cities including Vicenza, Padua, Mantua, and Venice. The position between the lake and the city is one of the hotel’s genuinely practical advantages — you’re not choosing between two things. You’re doing both.

Allegrini and Masi wineries — if you want to go deeper into Valpolicella wine beyond the Tommasi estate, both Allegrini and Masi are in the valley and both offer visits by appointment. Allegrini for the benchmark Amarone Classico. Masi for the Ripasso story and the Dante connection — their Serego Alighieri estate has been owned by the poet’s descendants since 1353. Book ahead for both.

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Getting There

Villa Quaranta sits in Ospedaletto di Pescantina — 15 minutes from Verona train station and Verona Catullo airport, 20 minutes from Lake Garda, and 90 minutes from Venice and Milan.

Fly into Verona if you can. It’s the smallest and most underrated of the Veneto’s three airports — no endless terminal walks, no queuing behind half of Europe, no hour-long bus to the city. You land, you collect your bags, you’re in a car heading into the Valpolicella hills before you’ve even decided what you want for dinner. That is the correct way to start a wine vacation.

If you’re coming from Venice, the drive west along the A4 takes about 90 minutes. The landscape changes gradually — the flatlands around the lagoon give way to the first hills, then the vineyards start appearing on the slopes, and somewhere around the turn-off for Pescantina you’ll catch your first glimpse of the kind of countryside that makes people move to the Veneto and never quite find a reason to leave.

You still need a car once you’re there. The valley roads don’t come to you. But with the airport this close and the hotel this central, the logistics are considerably simpler than most wine country destinations. Sort the car, follow the signs for Valpolicella, and let the rest take care of itself.

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Price Range

• Standard rooms: from around £154 per night
• Suites: from £250+ depending on season
• Spa access: additional cost, book treatments in advance
• Wine tastings at Cantina in Villa: various packages available
• Tommasi winery visit: book directly through the hotel

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Who Is This Trip For?

Anyone who wants to understand Amarone properly — not just drink it, but be inside the landscape that produced it, taste it with the family that makes it, put it on their face in a Turkish bath if that’s where the afternoon takes them.

Couples who want something that feels genuinely different from a city break. Wine lovers who want to actually be somewhere rather than just visit it. People who read our Prosecco hills post about CastelBrando and thought — yes, but make it darker, richer, more serious.

This is the darker, richer, more serious version. The Amarone to CastelBrando’s Prosecco, if you will.

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One Last Thing

The Veneto has two completely different personalities and this series is slowly introducing you to both of them.

The Prosecco hills are bright, sparkling, joyful — wine that tastes like a Tuesday afternoon turned into something worth celebrating.

Valpolicella is the other side. Serious, ancient, concentrated. Wine that asks you to slow down and pay attention. A landscape that rewards people who look properly rather than drive through quickly on the way to somewhere else.

Villa Quaranta sits right in the middle of that second personality — a 17th century villa, a century of winemaking tradition, a spa that puts Amarone on your face, and a wine list long enough to keep you busy for a week.

Some places just know what they are.

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Explore the full Veneto wine vacation series: Sleeping in a Castle in the Prosecco Hills — CastelBrando, The Veneto Wine Vacation Nobody Tells You About, and our Complete Guide to Prosecco. Next stop in the series — Verona.

#Valpolicella #WineVacation #VillaQuaranta #Amarone #VenetoWine #ItalianWineTravel #WineAndWellness