Last Saturday, late afternoon, somewhere between Siena and Buonconvento. Beyond the windows, densely wooded hills roll away in all directions, blankets of oak and chestnut broken occasionally by a stone-built farmhouse skirted in olive groves or vineyards. A few unpaved roads weave here and there, demarcated by rows of cypresses like deep-green sentinels standing against a hard blue spring sky.
The landscape is notable for its improbable emptiness: here we are, in Italy in 2025, but there are no superstradas, no Autogrills, not a single high-voltage pylon in sight — just countryside of the variety that increasingly exists only in age-faded postcards, or AI-adulterated algorithm fodder. For a fleeting few minutes, in a moving picture set to live piano music and the percussive rhythms of train wheels on track, the Orient Express La Dolce Vita passes through a stretch of proper Tuscan arcadia.
Reclaiming this version of Italy’s dolce vita — that pre-ironic, pre-revenge-travel notion of a sweet life that could only ever exist here — while traversing some of the least-plied railways in the country, is the twin sell of this sleeper train experience.
Conceived in 2019, it’s the first “new” iteration of the most famous name on the rails since the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (VSOE) debuted its London-to-Venice route in 1982 — and since French hospitality behemoth Accor acquired the brand in 2022. It was officially launched on Thursday, but I boarded in Rome last weekend, for a first look on an inaugural two-night “test journey”, traversing Tuscany and stopping in Siena en route to Venice.
La Dolce Vita’s two- and three-day itineraries range north to Montalcino, Venice and Portofino. They also venture deep into the country’s south, through Basilicata and Calabria and across the Strait of Messina to Sicily (the carriages are uncoupled and loaded on to a ferry that is privately chartered for the crossing).
Unlike the VSOE, which is focused on the onboard experience, La Dolce Vita includes multiple excursions beyond the rails in every itinerary. These range from dinners in private Venetian homes to tastings at the Antinori family’s Pian delle Vigne vineyard in Montalcino, along with curator-led museum visits in Siena, scenic hikes on Mount Etna and lunch in a restaurant inside a cave in Matera, the ancient Unesco-protected city. In May, the train will make a special trip crossing into the heart of the Abruzzo National Park on the historic Transiberiana d’Italia rail line; in November there’s a “Truffle Route” trip exploring the Monferrato region in Piedmont, with passengers tasting truffles and sought-after Barolo wines.
Most northbound journeys will depart from and return to Rome’s Ostiense station, where La Dolce Vita has commandeered a 200 sq metre private lounge. Its lavish interiors, with full bar, swaths of potted greenery and marble-clad shower facilities, were created by 35-year-old Parisian decorator du moment Hugo Toro, who is also responsible for the design of Orient Express La Minerva in Rome, which will open next week — the first hotel in the brand’s ambitious reboot.
Once the second property, Palazzo Donà Giovanelli, opens in Venice later this year, travellers will be able to “commute” from one hotel to another on one-way tickets. (An extravagantly circuitous commute, it must be said, at eight-and-a-half hours compared with four hours on one of Italy’s high-speed trains, and more expensive by a factor of about 50, but with vastly superior food, scenery, interiors and glamour quotient.)
The trains — currently two, there will be four next year, and six by 2027 — are made up of refurbished Ferrovie dello Stato (Italian State Railways) carriages from the 1960s. They were stripped back to their shells and fully restored; each 12-carriage train now holds 18 suites and 12 deluxe cabins, a bar and viewing lounge, and a restaurant. The décor is the work of Milan-based Dimorestudio, whose design assertively signals Italian glamour: 1960s-inspired, high-gloss, articulated in palettes and patterns that reference the era’s masters — Gio Ponti, Nanda Vigo, Osvaldo Borsani and their peers.
Dimore co-founder Britt Moran concedes that the project was a challenge. “The spaces are tiny, but there’s also a lot, technically speaking, that goes on behind all of the panelling; any changes had to be incorporated early on,” he says. “But we tried to push the material and colour boundaries, surprising people with both.”
The feedback on board is mixed, but net positive, leaning in a couple of cases towards dazzled. Corridors are upholstered in a café au lait-coloured suede, lined with original stills from Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita. A handful of two-seat banquettes in the bar are clad in walnut and creamy-white leather (they would invite lots of trysting, if the clientele weren’t largely coupled off).
The compact en-suite bathrooms glitter with fingernail-sized terrazzo tiles in black and white. The suites themselves are similarly snug — shorter and narrower than those on the VSOE — but space is cleverly optimised, with hidden alcoves behind pull-down bedside tables and cubbies designed into chairs. My suite’s curved ceiling is lacquered a rich burnt orange, and faintly reflects my own image back to me as I lie in bed.
The onboard menus have been created by Heinz Beck, a star of Italian gastronomy who has retained three Michelin stars for almost 20 years at La Pergola, his restaurant in Rome. The impressiveness of the whole dining experience — serious but never heavy, referencing the local flavours of whatever region the train is trundling through — grows by several orders of magnitude once you’ve seen the Lilliputian galley kitchen in which it all happens, and with no freezers to boot.
A five-course lunch sounded exactly like what I didn’t want to eat aboard a train, but proved to be surprisingly considered, from portions to interpretations; a bowl of tiny gnochetti served al cacio e pepe — a very cheese- and carb-forward Roman standard — was tempered with a base of foamy herb purée, which won over even the purists at my table.
Though Orient Express operates the train, it was conceived and created by Paolo Barletta, chief executive of Italian hospitality company Arsenale, which continues to own the rolling stock. He dreamt up the idea of a luxury sleeper train as travelling paean to eccellenze italiane, but didn’t expect to have to build it himself.
“One of the first things I did was have a feasibility discussion in 2020 with the Ferrovie dello Stato,” he tells me over an afternoon coffee, as we turn inland from a sinuous but spectacular leg along the Tuscan coast and head towards Venice, picking up speed. He shrugs and smiles. “They thought I was crazy. We’d wanted to be the hospitality operator aboard a train created by them, but no one even began to know how to deliver a product like what we wanted. So I had to become a train expert, which I definitely wasn’t, and create a train manufacturing business, which was never our intention.”
Barletta collaborated with Italy’s Fondazione FS, which cares for historic trains, runs railway museums and restores abandoned track for use by heritage operators. It was from its general manager, a former state-railway conductor called Luigi Cantamessa, that Barletta acquired his carriages, and Cantamessa has also given La Dolce Vita access to select stretches of those heritage lines, as well as to a handful of historic stations along them. Our Siena-Buonconvento route, for instance, with its throwback English Patient views, is normally exclusive to FS Treni Turistici Italiani; likewise, the Transiberiana d’Italia in Abruzzo.
Arranging for the Dolce Vita trains to run on these historic tracks is like “one long epic game of Tetris”, laughs Gilda Perez-Alvarado, Orient Express’s chief executive. The night before, she’d shaken tambourines and downed post-prandial cocktails with guests while a singer modelled very much on the Sinatra school of crooners sauntered up and down the lounge car, belting out classics from the Italian canon with tongue firmly in cheek.
“All of a sudden, trains are everywhere,” Perez-Alvarado told me, pointing to the much-discussed resurgence of sleepers across Europe and beyond. “It’s like a soft arms race in travel. Which is the best thing that could happen for consumers, it highlights the importance of competition. People don’t care what’s happening at the corporate level, they want to know what they’re getting, what’s special about us.”
What’s special are La Dolce Vita’s excursions, which will need to measure up to Italy’s better private curated experiences. Dinner in Venice was at the Palazzo Nani Bernardo, whose garden is one of the largest in the city. Its owner was there to parse its history for us over an aperitivo, before we sat down to a dinner in a top-floor room overlooking the Grand Canal, lit by hundreds of candles. So far, so favourably comparable, as is their having scored private access to Siena’s extraordinary state archives, whose vast collection of documents includes exquisite late-medieval decorated wooden manuscript covers (some by masters currently on show in London at the National Gallery’s Siena: The Rise of Painting exhibition).
By contrast, the actual ground logistics lacked some of the polish and personal touch that you’d expect from this train experience (and at these prices). The disembarkation in Siena was fairly directionless, with guests wandering and wondering which car and guide were theirs; the shepherding from the private palazzo spumante toast to various museums, and to lunch at Osteria Le Logge, more than once assumed the markedly unrelaxed energy of a group tour. To be fair, the point of such pre-launch test runs is to redress just such shortcomings; we received welcome letters on boarding alerting us to potential bumps, “literal and figurative”, along the way.
I query Perez-Alvarado about the inevitable comparison with the VSOE. “Besides the obvious differences, we are leveraging two entirely different eras of nostalgia. This is meant to in no way feel like a ‘stuffy’ train,” she says, in a not-so-veiled reference to the VSOE’s formal-at-supper dress code. “We want it to be the anti-stuffy.”
All well and good; but people sometimes need a steer. By our journey’s end, there was some speculation that dinner-dress code guidelines might actually be in order, thanks in part to one young passenger who arrived for dinner clad in ultra-short shorts and what appeared to be a couple of silk handkerchiefs strategically attached with gold chains. (I thought she looked amazing, for the record, but her chic was undeniably scanty.)
Whatever the disparity in dress codes, the long-anticipated rivalry between the newly reinvigorated Orient Express, and the VSOE (owned by Belmond, which is also expanding its range of luxury sleepers) seems to have been nipped in the bud. Last June, Accor unveiled a strategic partnership with the luxury giant LVMH, which took a 50 per cent stake in Orient Express in order to “accelerate” the brand’s development. LVMH had already snapped up Belmond (in 2019), and given Belmond’s Italian hotels include the Hotel Cipriani in Venice, the Villa San Michele in Florence, the Grand Hotel Timeo in Taormina and Hotel Splendido in Portofino, the scope for co-operation on future itineraries is clear.
For now, though, the journey more or less has what it needs. Rocked awake early Sunday morning en route back to Rome, I push back the curtain and watch southern Tuscany passing like a film, low sunlight reaching golden fingers between Calabrian pines. It’s the Maremma National Park, a place I’ve been many times — like Siena, like Venice — playing out from a wholly new vantage point. “I don’t want people to do this just once. That wasn’t my goal,” Barletta says. “My goal is for people to come see this country . . . And wherever there’s a track, I can put a luxury train.”
Maria Shollenbarger travelled as a guest of Orient Express La Dolce Vita (orient-express.com); rates start from €3,060 per person for a two-day itinerary, including all excursions, meals and house wines
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