Golf Club Parco de' Medici

Golf Club Parco de' Medici: On a former Pope's hunting estate, tucked away in the south-west corner of Rome, the Sheraton Parco de' Medici boasts 27-holes of elegant, lightly tree-lined parkland golf. The Blue-White nines comprise the championship course, with the considerably shorter Red-nine serving as a good warm-up facility or somewhere to fine-tune any parts of your game that are currently misfiring.

Laid out on relatively flat terrain, the course has many excellent and challenging holes, with plenty of stylish bunkering around the greens, and a pleasant array of pines, cypresses and weeping willows guiding you along the good-width, mounded fairways. Although Rome's principal river, the Tiber, passes within 200 metres of the course (hidden behind a large bank alongside the par-4 13th hole), the only water you'll be seeing are several small lakes and ponds, principally found around the immaculate greens and approaches to them.

The par-3 15th is perhaps the best of the par-3s, played to a heavily bunkered and then water-surrounded green. Also surrounded by water on three sides of their greens is a testing trio of short par-4s (at 5, 6 and 16), as well as the longer par-4 9th and par-5 18th.

Although there is not much to see beyond the course, and inevitably some traffic noise creeps in from nearby motorways, Parco de' Medici has been transformed into an enjoyable, resort-style parkland layout. The ancient building foundations and water well alongside the closing hole will have you musing what role they might have played in Pope Leo X's former hunting grounds.