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Italy detox holidays: Diet and decadence in luscious Lombardy

Detoxes are never easy, especially on holiday, particularly in Italy.

This is the country where you kick off an evening with biscotti and a heart-stirring shot, alternate between pasta, pizza, creamy mozzarella, salty olives, Parma ham, and round that off with gelato and lashings of limoncello. Not exactly a recipe for slim living.

A grape escape: L'Albereta sits amid leafy vineyards in the Italian region of Lombardy

And yet, those sleek Italians and body-conscious Milanese keep their figures.

How? They visit L’Albereta, in Lombardy, once a year.

This smart hotel, only a 35 minute journey from the good-looking Lombard capital Milan, has a strict spa, Henri Chenot. It also has a vineyard and delicious Gualtiero Marchesi restaurant, should you want to slide off the regime in spectacular style (and you may want to).

Here is gluttony or restraint under one, very plush roof.

  More... More on lovely Lombardy in our Italy section More soothing escapes in our Spa section Ooh la spa! Winding down in the Carmague

People seeking to thin down check in for a week, and spend their time being pummelled, pinched and persuaded into shape. Some go on the bio-light diet, where calories are 600 per day.

No caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar, no naughty fats.

I am only here for two nights. My heart isn’t quite in the diet, particularly when I find that the bar serves chunks of parmesan with their aperitifs.

Nonetheless my first port of call is with the spa doctor, who has stern specs and a white coat. I arrived on a 6am flight, after a 4am start. I look grey – which has her worried. She asks if I am pregnant.

Next is the dietician. She wires me up to a machine, which measures body mass. I have lazy muscles

Dieting delights: L'Albereta offers plenty of spa amenities and soft furnishings to make any detox comfortable

Far nicer, and less blush-making, are the treatments. Therapies range from the very pampering – full-on facials, energetic massages, deep whoosy baths, mud packs, blastings with a hose – to those that border on cosmetic surgery. You could, literally, come away from here looking a different person.

The most popular procedure is a scalp treatment, from which several guests emerge wearing tinfoil hats. It is, according to a fellow spa-goer, amazing. But I want to know why the receptionist’s skin is so glowy and youthful. She leans over and whispers, guess how old I am? 65! She’d pass for 45. Her secret? A week on the bio-light diet once a year, and good genes.

The spa has everything you need to get your circulation going - a warm shallow pool, a very cold plunge pool, a sauna and steam room and lots of chill out areas for flopping about in a towel robe, medallion optional.

Treatments continue in the Bio-light restaurant, which serves earnest meals with health in mind.

Families are lunching here with their children, which is tormenting. While you (and their parents) are tucking into very green broccoli soup and a granary roll, the children are joyfully wolfing caprese salads and carbonara. One little French boy on the table next to us is asked by Papa what he’d like for lunch. He replies “steak frites”. Me too!

A Russian man to our right, says to his wife, “thank God this is our last day, I couldn’t go on like this”. I think, if I brought my boyfriend here, he would devour me whole before the week was out.

Restricting yourself at L’Albereta isn’t the only option. Quite the opposite. The Gualtiero Marchesi restaurant offers the smoothest wines from the surrounding vineyards, and an emphasis on glorious gluttony. Goodbye spelt roll, hello bread basket, foie gras, salt crusted fish and saffron risotto.

Italian immaculate: Lombardy offers plenty of pristine scenery, including the glorious Lake Iseo

I ask a fellow guest, a Russian named Gregory – who comes back every year for a week and says he emerges a new man – how he is getting on with the diet. He tells me he sneaks out for langoustines and oysters in a seafood restaurant.

Herein lies the problem.

Italy is so wonderfully decadent when it comes to food and wine, and the Italians embody the notion of joie-de-vivre so beautifully that a diet of this sort, amid these very pretty sloping hills, doesn’t seem quite right. Better to come here for a thoroughly guilty weekend and save the detox for back home.

Travel Facts

A three-night stay at L’Albereta costs from £679 per person, including return flights, airport transfers, a complimentary wine-tasting tour and a one day pass to the spa (excluding September), booked through Kirker Holidays (020 7593 1899; www.kirkerholidays.com).

For further information on L’Albereta, see www.albereta.it.




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