How dolce is Orient Express’s new Grand Tour?
The luxury travel group has combined its Italian hotels, train and sailing yacht into one Byronic modern adventure
The Orient Express Grand Italian Tour begins as you step off a plane at Marco Polo Airport in Venice and a driver stands holding a sign with the Orient Express logo. There are no consulting detectives or plucky young things with an eye for a mystery in sight; in these cosy crime-saturated times that might be a relief.
The Orient Express La Dolce Vita train is, despite its storied prefix, a start-up brand. Owned by the French hospitality group Accor, it competes with the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express – now owned by Belmond – which runs the original Agatha Christie trains. La Dolce Vita pledges to take you to something nearer the spirit of its original customers; not so much their quest to murder, more an ambition to travel across Europe in the greatest comfort possible.
So it is a select number of journalists who swoop down the Grand Canal in water taxis, disembarking at Orient Express Venezia, a palazzo of such pedigree it has previously only been owned by aristocracy. An air of hush is very lightly undermined by the influencers, the Byron and Shelley of their era: more costume changes but equally gorgeous and glamorous, and a clue that the target audience here might not be English poets.
The OE Venezia has been open since spring following an eight-year renovation. Built in 1436, and given to the Duke of Urbino, it was occupied by the Giovanelli family until 20 years ago, and the grandeur of its public spaces endures. Its neo-gothic staircase, beamed ceilings and 19th-century frescoes in the suites will sate even the $20k-a-night appetite; ceiling ancient, plumbing brand-new.
A day later we are taxied to Santa Lucia station to meet La Dolce Vita, the Orient Express train. The staff line up along the platform to greet you; as we board it becomes clear that we can embrace the infantilisation of great luxury. This new train has been purpose-designed in roaring 1960s Italian style, and a suite is an actual suite: a spacious double bed, a bathroom that is truly a bathroom. You could, in fact, spend several days just on this train, which some guests do.
We leave Venice toasting our good fortune, wondering how on earth it can take 24 hours to get to Rome when Trenitalia can do it in less than four. Seated with strangers, making a splendid progress through scenic Tuscany, we tell travel stories over a splendid tasting menu. Four wines and five courses take travellers to the Bar Car, where live music continues past midnight (your correspondent, not having the constitution of Lord Byron, does not).
Even the furnishing-illiterate in our party can sense that we are within the same family as the hotel we have just left. We move as a small, elegant pack to a historic wooden steam train to take us to Siena for a day out. (The reality proves to be an excellent photo opportunity for seven minutes, followed by a slightly uncomfortable hour on a slow, rattling historic train with hard benches for middle-aged people who are immensely relieved to learn we will be returning in people carriers with suspension and air conditioning. So much for verisimilitude.)
In Siena, the aspirational distinction between an OE excursion and your average day trip becomes clear. Our group includes journalists, film-makers and senior geopoliticians, but our guide is more than up to demystifying the 17 distinct contrade and their traditional rituals of sabotage and corruption. We walk the walled city, pass a delightful informed hour in the cathedral and are then whisked to the palace of the town’s senior noble family to drink franciacorta with the patrician and his uniformed man. They proudly display their view of the Palio, the town’s bareback horse race (run twice a year due to its tourism-boosting popularity). Then a multi-hour lunch.
The travellers are getting on very well. I’m always suspicious of cruises and tour groups for precisely this reason: what if people want to make friends with me? But somehow this is genuinely convivial. Perhaps it is the dolce rubbing off.
A band greets us as we pull into Ostiense Station, and are housed in an extremely elegant proprietary lounge. It takes a while, though, to transfer 50 people into their people carriers to Orient Express La Minerva, and even – perhaps especially? – at the highest end of luxury, any pecking order is policed and resented. When we arrive the hotel staff are enormously apologetic at even a moment’s inconvenience in our sweet, sweet life. I am reminded of something an experienced hand said to me earlier in the trip: “The very rich are nicer.”
It is merely a pause in Rome at La Minerva, another immaculate renovation of an original Grand Italian Tour address with a feature rooftop restaurant boasting views of the Pantheon. One stationary sleep and luxury bath later, we are whisked to the port just outside the city, where the OE Corinthian is docked – at the time of writing the world’s largest sailing yacht.
Boarding the Corinthian feels like ascending to a rarefied world of bespoke everything. The OE CEO Amélie Thiriet explains the idea is to capture the spirit and the essence of the Grand Italian Tour – to be somewhere you could reach on a big cruise, but to travel in a style tailored to you.
It is, at first, almost eerily restrained. Every carpet is deep pile. The motion of the sea is undetectable. So padded and tasteful and spacious is this craft, it is possible to open a door and accidentally find a lap pool open to the sky. Or a tasting-menu restaurant run by a chef with 18 Michelin stars between their restaurants. Or a speakeasy, or a recording studio. There could be more signage, but then you would lose the feeling that it is, in fact, your yacht. It is a perpetual surprise to find anyone else aboard, though with just 54 suites, you are far more likely to see staff than guests.
The yacht is a technological marvel. The sails are made of carbon fibre and magic. Even the captain, Rémi Genevaz, shrugs and declares himself not an engineer when asked to explain why they are so special, but he is very clear it is a real sailing yacht: he can navigate some Caribbean routes for 80-90 per cent of the journey without using fuel thanks to trade winds, and even on the Med saves 20 per cent.
My experience is that they are hypnotically aesthetically pleasing. Best enjoyed after diving from the back of the ship – while it is at anchor, ideally. Indeed, if you take the tender to Capri, our excursion stop, you might conclude Capri itself is optimally viewed from just far enough out to sea to be unable to make out the crocodile line of tourists winding their way up and down its boutique-lined alleys.
If at least half of the point of owning a yacht is bragging rights – and it must be – you can be perfectly smug about mounting the Corinthian in full view of Capri’s gawpers. Its deep blue livery and extraordinary sails are eye-catchers. The most extravagant suites run half the length of the ship, include multiple bedrooms within and stunning private dining rooms. One contains an exact replica of a carriage from the original Orient Express train, fully restored with gleaming marquetry, bunk beds and open-up vanity sink; a little Easter egg buried deep in a superyacht.
This year’s itineraries start at seven days, but can be daisy-chained together to build a 12-day trip. Shipmates I meet at a disembarkation dinner in Porto Cervo, Sardinia – including this time a senior US political figure, the designer of a tech product you definitely own and some international property investors – are doing just that. Later this year the transatlantic cruise will open up 11 days of straight ocean sailing to enjoy the facilities.
Certainly in two days the volume of activities – gym classes, tasting menus, games, cinema, off-board excursions – might feel overwhelming. Equally as appealing is enjoying the true luxury at the heart of all this munificence: the space and peace of a private terrace for staring at the sea. Waking up and breakfasting on the Med, cosseted in a bathrobe while a butler serves the eggs, is quite the moment. I suspect the Grand Italian Tour itinerary might be sweeter taken at a slower pace. But even at whistle-stop, the shock and awe will endure.