How to Host a Retreat in Tuscany

The idea usually arrives fully formed. You can see the week in your head: the room, the people, the light, what you would teach on the third morning. What you cannot see is any of the logistics, and that is normally where the idea sits for a year or two.

This is an attempt to answer the practical half, so you can work out whether hosting a retreat in Tuscany is actually possible for you before you spend another winter wondering. It is written from a retreat centre in the southern Tuscan hills, so there is an obvious interest at play here, but almost everything below applies wherever you end up going.

Start with your numbers, not your venue

Everyone starts by looking at places. It is the fun part. It is also the reason so many people lose a month.

Three numbers decide nearly everything else, and until you have them, no venue can give you a straight answer.

How many people are coming. Not how many you would love. How many you can realistically fill, based on how many are already on your list and how many turned up to the last thing you ran. Be unkind to yourself here. It is cheaper than being wrong later.

How they will sleep. Does everyone need a room of their own, or will your people share? This single question changes the price more than any other, and most facilitators have not thought about it before they enquire.

When. A season, not a date, is enough to begin.

With those three you can get a real quote from anywhere. Without them you will get a range, which is another way of saying no answer at all.

Exclusive use, or sharing the land

Venues fall into two kinds, and the difference matters more than the photographs do.

Exclusive use means the place is yours. Nobody else walking the paths, nobody else at breakfast, no other group's energy to work around. For deep work this is usually worth paying for, because a participant who meets a stranger on the way back from a session has been quietly pulled out of the week.

Shared use means your rooms and your teaching space are yours, and other guests are somewhere on the property. Perfectly workable for lighter programmes, and considerably cheaper.

At ASHA the hinge is twelve. From twelve rooms the whole campus is yours. Between twelve and eighteen people, you can take the shared option, where your rooms and your practice space are exclusively yours and a few residential guests may be walking the land at a distance. Below twelve we point people at Alchemy Residential Club instead, where a small group can simply come and stay without any of the contractual machinery.

Whatever venue you look at, ask which one you are buying. Some places sell "exclusive use" that turns out to mean exclusive use of the building you are sleeping in.

Where everyone sleeps

This is the question your participants will actually care about, and it is where most Tuscan venues quietly disappoint.

A villa that sleeps twelve usually means six bedrooms with two people in each. That is fine for a family holiday and it is a problem for a retreat, because the person who has come to do difficult work now has a roommate, and the person paying the most has nowhere to go at four in the afternoon.

So ask the question in this form: how many people can have a room to themselves? Not how many it sleeps.

For reference, here is what that looks like at ASHA, across sixteen private rooms in five separate cottages. Every room can be made up as a double, so a room of one's own is a proper double bed rather than a single pushed against a wall, and fourteen of the sixteen have their own bathroom.

	High season	Shoulder	Winter
Private rooms	16	16	12
A room each	16	16	12
Sharing rooms	32	32	24
Pull-out places	6	6	6
Glamping places	11	11	Closed
Most we take	49	30	28
Everyone in one room	40	28	28

Two things in that table are worth lifting out.

The first is that the maximum drops a long way outside high season, because the tents and the open-sided marquee are weather-dependent and we do not pretend otherwise. More on that in the best time of year for a retreat in Italy.

The second is the bottom row, and it is the one most people forget to ask about anywhere.

Where you teach, and how many fit in it

How many you can sleep and how many you can gather in one room are different numbers. In high season at ASHA you can sleep forty-nine and sit forty in a single space. If your programme depends on one circle, one sharing round, one closing ceremony with everybody in it, the smaller number is your actual ceiling.

Ask every venue: what is the capacity of the main practice space, with mats down, and is it heated?

Ask also how many practice spaces there are. Running breakout groups, or a programme with two things happening at once, needs more than one room. ASHA has three in summer, the Nadi Shala, the Dharma Den and the Prana Shala marquee, and two through the winter, both heated.

And ask whether the space is exclusively yours for the whole booking, or whether someone else has it on Thursday afternoon.

Food

There are three models, and the right one depends on what kind of leader you are.

The venue cooks. Simplest, most expensive, and almost always correct if you have never run a retreat before. You will have enough to hold without also holding lunch.

You self-cater. Much cheaper, and it only works if you have a professional kitchen and somebody whose actual job is that kitchen. Cooking for twenty while also facilitating is a well-known way to ruin your own week.

You bring your own chef. The best of both, if you have one, and it requires a venue that will let an outsider into its kitchen. Many will not.

Ask whether the kitchen is included or charged separately, what equipment is actually in it, and whether your chef can use it.

Choosing your season

Briefly, since the cluster post covers it properly.

High season, June to September here, gives you long light, everything open, full capacity, and the weeks that get taken first. Book a year or more ahead.

Shoulder, May and October, costs less and comes with a weather gamble that reduces your maximum numbers. For a smaller group it is arguably the better week: softer light, a quieter hillside, and the heat gone.

Winter, November to April, is heated rooms, bare hills and almost nobody else anywhere. Underrated for writing retreats, trainings and anything that does not need to be outdoors.

What it costs, and why nobody will publish a number

You will notice that serious venues quote rather than price-list, and it is not evasion.

The real number depends on your season, your headcount and your sleeping arrangement, and those three interact. Twelve people with a room each in October is a different proposition from twelve people sharing in July. A published per-person rate would be wrong for almost everyone who read it.

What you should expect is a written quote with a figure in it, not a range, and reasonably quickly. We aim to come back within two days.

The terms worth asking about before you fall in love

The contract tells you more about a venue than the photographs do.

• What holds the date, and when is the balance due? Half up front and the balance ninety days out is common and reasonable.

• Is there a security deposit, and is it refundable?

• Is cancellation tiered or all or nothing? This matters enormously. A venue that keeps everything whenever you cancel is transferring all the risk to you. Tiered terms mean cancelling well ahead does not write off the whole sum.

• Do your teaching team sleep free? They should, scaled to group size. At ASHA that is one free bed from ten guests, two from twenty, three from forty.

• What is the minimum stay? Six nights, Sunday to Saturday, is the usual shape and it exists because changeover days are real work.

Getting people there

Southern Tuscany is more reachable than it looks on a map, and participants will ask before they book, so have the answer ready.

For ASHA, the nearest station is Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, which is on the main Rome to Florence line. Rome Fiumicino and Florence are the two practical airports. Transfers from the station are arranged.

Put the travel information in your own sales page rather than leaving it to the venue. A participant who cannot work out how to arrive often simply does not.

A short checklist before you enquire

1. Your realistic headcount.

2. Whether they sleep one to a room or share.

3. Your season, roughly.

4. The largest group you need to seat in a single room at once.

5. Whether you want to be cooked for.

6. Your two or three must-haves, and your two or three could-live-withouts.

Send those six things and any decent venue can answer you properly. If they still come back with a range, that tells you something.

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If a week in the southern Tuscan hills is what you have been picturing, we would like to hear about it. Tell Kathrin your dates, your numbers and how you want people to sleep, at events@asha.global, and she will come back with a written quote, usually within two days. You can also look at the land and the rooms first. If you would rather come and feel the place before committing to anything, a BreathCamp is the easiest way in.