Italy's most beautiful countryside destinations: Escape the Tuscan tourist trail at Borgo San Felice

As medieval villages go, Borgo San Felice rather lacks lepers and noisome peasants. Instead, it has farmworkers in wine-splattered overalls and is perfumed with bee-buzzing lavender and lemon trees. There isn't a single trinket store in what is surely one of Tuscany's prettiest villages. It's 15 kilometres from Siena, where I've passed a dazed morning being elbowed by gelato-slurping, selfie-seeking crowds. Here, only a couple of bikini-clad Norwegians flop by the pool. I sit on the terrace with a tall drink, lulled by the thwack of a tennis ball and a distant tractor's rumble.

There has been a village on this knoll above the olive groves and vineyards since at least 714, when records show two bishops squabbling over its ownership. Its Romanesque chapel is thick-walled and shadowy. By the 15th century, Borgo San Felice was notable for wine and other agricultural produce, and had acquired a bakery, olive press and workers' cottages. In the last century, its surrounding estate has been at the vanguard of sangiovese grape development and the reputation of Chianti Classico wines.

All this ought to create the perfect tourism storm, but you won't find more than a couple of people sipping at the cellar door. The village sleeps in the hot sun. As cedar trees start to throw long shadows, a handful of people emerge for drinks, chatting on the San Felice restaurant terrace as they tuck into home-style Tuscan dishes such as black-cabbage polenta or braised veal cheeks. If you want a tranquil Tuscany, this is the place.

This exclusivity does, of course, come at a price. What has saved Borgo San Felice is its reincarnation as a Relais & Chateaux hotel. It doesn't have a hotel, it actually is a hotel, with every building but the church converted to accommodation and facilities. In 1991 the entire village and several surrounding estates was bought by an investment company and transformed into an "alberghi diffusi". It isn't the only "diffused hotel" in Tuscany, but it's the most fully and charmingly realised.

Borgo San Felice offers dozens of scattered rooms of varying shapes and sizes, most in the five buildings that surround the main piazza. The interior decor hovers somewhere in the 19th century and tends towards Tuscan furnishings and rich fabrics. It's rustic rather than opulent – expect terracotta floors, stone walls, beamed ceilings – and perhaps old-fashioned, but in a way that sits comfortably with the historic nature of the village, with its honey-coloured stone, tiny lanes and massive eruptions of potted petunias and geraniums.

Guests will not want to linger in their rooms given how beautiful it is outside. The spa is state of the art, the swimming pool gorgeous, the restaurant terrace an invitation to evening lingering. The more formal, two-Michelin-star Poggio Rosso restaurant provides the fine fare you'd expect of the gourmet-oriented Relais & Chateaux brand. It focuses on ingredients from the Chianti region: wine, olive oil, shallots, black truffles, chickpeas, bacon, pecorino cheese, ravioli flavoured with saffron from nearby tourist-swamped San Gimignano. The menu seduces with cuttlefish tagliatelle, lamb loin with rhubarb compote, suckling pig with spring garlic cream that the waiter, Lorenzo, who hails from nearby Arezzo, says is his favourite dish.

If you want a tranquil Tuscany, this is the place.

Arezzo's basilica houses outstanding Renaissance frescoes and is a less-frequented alternative to Siena. Borgo San Felice is a good base for hitting the Tuscan road less travelled. Head northeast and the landscape becomes rugged, almost sinister, draped in oak and chestnut forest. Five kilometres away, San Gusme – where toothless old men sit outside authentic village bars, not tourist traps – has one of Tuscany's most spectacular outlooks. Nearby Brolio Castle is a Gothic hillside fantasy hidden in forest.