The Cast of You, Me & Tuscany Share Their Italy Travel Guide

For so long as Halle Bailey might bear in mind, Italy lived in her creativeness as a single picture: a lady operating via a winery. She traces it to no explicit movie or second, however to one thing extra diffuse. “It was just a beautiful feeling,” she says. “The big sky, rows of vines going forever.” So when producer Will Packer (Ride Along, Girls Trip) referred to as her about starring in a romantic comedy set in Tuscany, Bailey barely wanted asking. “The minute he said it was set in Italy, I was like, ‘Where do I sign?’ ” she recollects.

That’s how the singer and actress — greatest identified for taking part in Ariel within the live-action The Little Mermaid — discovered herself dashing previous sun-warmed Sangiovese grapes for You, Me & Tuscany, Universal’s warm-blooded new romantic comedy shot among the many rolling hills and historical stone cities of Italy’s storied countryside. The movie opens April 10. “You hear that phrase ‘fantasy come to life,’ ” Bailey says. “But this was really it.”

In the movie, Bailey performs Anna, a culinary-school dropout from New York who impulsively slips away to a Tuscan villa and falls right into a tannin-rich entanglement with Michael, a polyglot vintner performed by Regé-Jean Page, the charismatic Bridgerton alum. The story includes a household restaurant, old school romantic hijinks, and sufficient handmade pici pasta and ink-red Brunello to make you need to ebook a flight mid-picture. Director Kat Coiro — whose credit embody Marry Me, Matlock and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law — got down to honor Italy right down to the smallest element.

“I kept saying, ‘Don’t let me get the Italian-ness wrong,’” says Coiro, who’s Italian-American and is at present pursuing her Italian citizenship. She introduced on manufacturing designer Elena Albanese (The Spiderwick Chronicles), an Italian herself, and requested the crew to interrogate each sandwich, each desk setting, each glass of wine: Does this ring true to Italy? “I wanted Italians to feel like this is a film for them,” Coiro says.

You, Me & Tuscany joins an extended and distinguished line of productions seduced by the Tuscan gentle. Under the Tuscan Sun turned the area’s golden hills right into a template for reinvention. The English Patient shot on the Monastery Sant’Anna in rustic Camprena. Gladiator used the cypress-lined Val d’Orcia area of southern Tuscany as a backdrop. Italy provides worldwide productions a nationwide tax credit score of as much as 40 p.c, whereas the Toscana Film Commission assists with permits, native coordination and site scouting. Packer confirms that price management was central to the choice to shoot the complete movie on Italian soil, together with sequences nominally set in New York. “It worked brilliantly that the economics lined up with the authenticity,” he says.

Filming spanned 34 days, break up between Rome and the Val d’Orcia. In Rome, the corporate labored at Cinecittà, the legendary studio the place Ben-Hur, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Gangs of New York have been made. Most interiors have been constructed on phases there, giving Coiro exact management over the lighting and design that sign Anna’s transition from New York’s cool restraint into Tuscany’s hotter palette. Then the manufacturing moved north, and Italy’s cultural rhythms formed the shoot as a lot as its surroundings. Italian crews don’t do extra time. They work shorter hours, then go stay their lives, and people hours are non-negotiable. “They do not live to work,” Coiro says. “They work to enjoy.” That insistence on stability pressured the manufacturing to function with precision. Locations have been stored shut collectively, and each hour was used effectively. The consequence was a lean shoot that, paradoxically, made house for precisely what the movie celebrates: really having fun with the nation you’re in. “It felt like the whole thing was a vacation,” Coiro says.

The firm primarily based itself close to Pienza, a UNESCO hilltop town often called the best metropolis of the Renaissance and domestically well-known for its assertively aromatic pecorino. “It’s very stinky,” Page confirms cheerfully. “A sign of the quality of the cheese, I’d say.”

Coiro shot most out of doors materials on a single family-owned winery within the space. The property incorporates a number of villas, a wine store, a piazza and a thirteenth century fort tower, with a founding story stranger than fiction: The house owners found it within the Sixties, hacking via overgrowth with a machete to disclose an 18th century villa untouched for hundreds of years. The wines are named for celestial our bodies. “The worry I have,” Coiro says, “is that people will think we shot it on a greenscreen because everything looks so perfect.”

Recalls Bailey of filming within the winery, “The first day I got to Tuscany, I opened the shutters, and the view just hit me. I had this moment of, ‘I can’t believe this is my life.’ ” She introduced alongside her almost-2-year-old son, Halo, and says they have been welcomed like household. “Everyone would pass the baby around and dote on him.” Bailey took a number of cooking lessons for the position — “I learned to do the pan flip and all those fancy knife techniques” — and spent her downtime attempting to find kitchen items to carry dwelling. “I’m a shopping girl, so I bought these beautiful yellow lemon plates, and lots of olive oils and jellies.” She additionally found Narni, a pure thermal pool within the Umbrian hills roughly an hour from the Val d’Orcia base. She cherished it a lot, she went twice.

Page was new to Tuscany regardless of earlier Italian travels to Milan and Venice and spent his days off driving again roads in a rented 4×4, working via the hilltop cities scattered throughout the area. “My favorite hobby was just getting in the car and driving to a new little hamlet,” he says. “There’s usually maybe two restaurants. You’d pick one and just eat whatever Nonna’s cooking — half the time it’s a grandma back there in the kitchen. It’s the best way to discover food and people.” In the evenings, the hamlet the place he was staying held lantern-lit courtyard live shows, with stay music bouncing off previous stone. “It felt so cinematic,” he says. “We were making a movie and somehow I was also living one.”

The surrounding wine nation deepened the spell. Nearby lie two of Italy’s most revered areas: Montepulciano and Montalcino, the place some of the world’s most celebrated Brunello is made. Page was so taken that on the final day of manufacturing he despatched forged and crew dwelling with bottles from the property winery. “It was something that came off the soil of the place we’d been working,” he says. “Which felt right.”

Italian vehicles, in the meantime, turned Coiro’s obsession. The authentic script by Ryan Engle (Non-Stop) had one convertible. By the time Coiro was achieved, she had added an iconic three-wheeled Ape, a tiny Fiat, an electrical Topolino and a Maserati — “the whole gamut of Italian vehicles,” she says. She additionally tucked a single Vespa right into a market shot, far sufficient again that it wouldn’t learn as a cliché. “The Italians begged me not to since every American movie has a Vespa,” she says. “So there’s just one, deep in the background.”

And at the very least as soon as, the prop division blurred the road between efficiency and pleasure. During a wine-tasting scene, Bailey and Page realized that what they have been swigging wasn’t diluted grape juice. “I think that’s real,” Bailey stated on the time. Page agreed, and Coiro felt compelled to research for herself. As for whether or not the bottles have been ever quietly swapped out — “I can neither confirm nor deny,” says Packer, with fun.

The meals was equally genuine. Coiro had employed meals stylists within the standard approach, then stood on set one afternoon watching the plates arrive and felt one thing was off. She turned to the chef whose restaurant they have been filming inside and requested straight: Is this Italian sufficient? He stated no. She employed him on the spot. “He ended up being our chef and our consultant,” she says. He served handmade pasta on the monitor whereas she directed, and Coiro has footage of herself consuming from porcelain with a correct fork between takes. “I show it when I come back to work in America,” she jokes. “These are my standards now.”

Off set, Coiro visited the Adler, a thermal spa resort within the Val d’Orcia that she calls “one of the most amazing destinations I’ve ever visited in my entire life.” She says her Oura ring registered in “restored” mode all through manufacturing, indicating a state of pure calm. Packer’s spouse had her personal model of that response at Six Senses Rome, the place the manufacturing filmed key scenes. “She told me, ‘You go back to New Jersey. I’m good here,’ ” Packer laughs. “I am very glad she came home eventually.”

A reverence for Italian life prolonged naturally to the land itself. Sustainability was constructed into the manufacturing from the beginning, supported by NBCUniversal’s GreenerLight program. Coiro, who sits on the board of the environmental nonprofit Habits of Waste, ensured the movie’s themes — contemporary natural meals, connection to the land, a tradition of reuse — prolonged past the display and onto the set itself. The artwork division integrated reusable and returnable building supplies wherever potential, with units saved, returned, or donated after filming.

Not that anybody wished the shoot to finish. Every Friday whereas filming in Tuscany, the manufacturing wrapped and a DJ would spin within the piazza. Hair and make-up, digital camera operators and two native guitar gamers — employed as extras who turned recurring forged — launched a dance celebration within the city sq.. It impressed a last-minute script change: The authentic ending had Bailey’s character say “Let’s eat” and minimize to black. Coiro rewrote it on the spot.

Now the movie closes with a celebration. “The theme of this movie is joy,” says the director. “If people take anything from it, I want it to be: Italy makes you feel great.”

Bailey is aware of that holds even for armchair vacationers. “Close your eyes,” she says. “The vineyard fantasy is right there.”

THR‘s GUIDE TO TUSCANY AND BEYOND

WHERE TO STAY

Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco (Val d’Orcia) A non-public Brunello property unfold throughout 4,200 acres of Val d’Orcia countryside, the place the wine is estate-grown and seclusion is assured.

Castello di Casole, A Belmond Hotel (Siena countryside) A restored tenth century fort with sweeping Tuscan views and sufficient historical past within the partitions to maintain you up at night time, fortunately.

La Bandita Townhouse (Pienza) “This chic little hotel — with an elegant garden for dinner in the summer — is owned by former New York record industry exec John Voigtmann, who lives nearby and is an enthusiastic connoisseur of the region’s wine scene,” says Emily FitzRoy, founder of Italian travel advisory Bellini Travel.

Borgo Santo Pietro (Chiusdino, close to Siena) A medieval hamlet turned refined farm property the place Michelin-caliber dinners arrive alongside morning bins of backyard produce. Regé-Jean Page primarily based himself there throughout manufacturing. “It was out in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I could go running in the mornings and not meet a car for an hour.”

Casa Newton (close to Pienza) A design-forward non-public villa close to Pienza with countryside views which might be value flying for.

WHERE TO EAT

Ristorante Campo del Drago (Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco, Val d’Orcia) Two Michelin stars, property Brunello and a setting that turns each meal into an event.

Osmosi (Montepulciano) Michelin-recognized modern tasting menus in a hill city the place the meals is as rigorously thought of because the sight traces.

Osteria di Porta al Cassero (Montalcino) The kind of unhurried, polished trattoria you come to Brunello nation particularly to search out.

Osteria del Leone (Bagno Vignoni) “This is one of our favourite lunch spots in all of Tuscany,” says Bellini Travel’s Emily FitzRoy. “Keep to the classics and don’t miss the porcini when in season, fried or with tagliatelle.”

Osteria Le Logge (Siena) “On a side street leading off the Campo, in an old pharmacy, you will find one of the best restaurants in Italy. Our friend Mirco is the owner, a wine obsessive who produces his own Brunello di Montalcino,” says FitzRoy, who advises to “always request a table in the atmospheric main dining room.”

L’Osteria di Maccarese (Rome) The on-set restaurant from You, Me & Tuscany, the place the pici is simply pretty much as good off-camera. Halle Bailey remains to be speaking in regards to the chef’s arrabbiata with crispy pancetta. “The best thing I’ve ever had,” she says.

Trattoria Cacio e Pepe ai Prati (Rome) Kat Coiro’s private Roman favourite, a neighborhood establishment within the Prati district, was a brief stroll from her house throughout manufacturing. “You could have dinner for like $20 and it was incredible.”

WHERE TO DRINK

Mastrojanni (Montalcino) Old-school Brunello royalty, the place the wines are as storied because the hillsides they arrive from.

Castiglion del Bosco Winery (Montalcino) Estate Brunello tastings inside a working vineyard that doubles as one of the valley’s most stunning properties.

Avignonesi (Montepulciano) A biodynamic Vino Nobile property the place farming with conviction makes for higher wine.

Salcheto (Montepulciano) The most carbon-conscious cellar in Tuscany, the place doing the appropriate factor and ingesting effectively are one and the identical.

WHERE TO UNWIND

Adler Spa Resort Thermae (Val d’Orcia) Natural thermal waters and countryside stillness. Coiro’s off-set spotlight of the complete shoot. “One of the most amazing destinations I’ve ever visited in my entire life,” she says.

Narni Thermal Springs (Umbria) Not Tuscany, however well worth the detour: a pure thermal pool within the Umbrian hills stated to have impressed C.S. Lewis in naming Narnia. Bailey went twice. “The water is this crystal-clear turquoise,” she says. “Cold, but so invigorating.”

Six Senses Rome Spa (Rome) A high-design city sanctuary inside one of Rome’s most stunning transformed palazzos.

This story seems in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2026 Travel Issue. Click here to read more.