Netflix's political thriller The Diplomat sends Keri Russell's Ambassador Kate Wyler from Windsor Castle to Washington and finally to a G7 summit in Lucca, Italy — and the real filming map is far more scattered than the show admits. Production designer Curt Beech has been pulling back the curtain on how season four was stitched together across England, New York and Tuscany.
The assassination attempt on President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) outside Windsor Castle in episode one was assembled from nine separate locations. Burghley House stood in for the exterior and courtyard, while Belvoir Castle, Lancaster House and the British Foreign Office covered the interiors. Stateside, the crew used the Woolworth Estate, St Josaphat Monastery Library and Sleepy Hollow Country Club — and the panic room where Kate and Hal are locked down is actually a church crypt on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Plenty of the show's familiar sets also have real-world anchors. Winfield House, the US ambassador's London residence, is Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, with some rooms filmed there and others recreated at Steiner Studios in New York. 10 Downing Street got a new set this year, its exterior shot outside the Foreign Office in London and its famous staircase borrowed from the Steinway Mansion in New York. One scene even uses the real US Embassy in Nine Elms. Ingatestone Hall in Essex provided the gate and entry for the new prime minister's family manor, with interiors shot in a Long Island house. Eidra's stark Tribeca apartment is a real rental — fittingly impersonal for a CIA station chief who relocates constantly.
The big travel payoff, though, is Italy. The finale's G7 summit was filmed on location in Lucca over six weeks, across eight spots including Villa Viesca (former summer home of Salvatore Ferragamo), the Tuscan resort Dimora Ghirlandaio, and the frescoed Villa Reale di Marlia, Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano and Villa Medicea La Petraia. Beech says the team initially considered faking Lucca with Florence but chose to embrace the real city — ditching the Pitti Palace in favour of rooms with floor-to-ceiling frescoes, then building bespoke summit desks to match.
Why care? If the show has you fantasising about grand English estates or a Tuscan villa holiday, most of these places are visitable. Burghley House, Belvoir Castle, Ingatestone Hall and Wrotham Park all welcome visitors at various times of year, and the Lucca villas — some functioning as resorts or event venues — sit within easy reach of Florence and Pisa. A 'Diplomat' location-hopping trip through Hertfordshire, Essex and Tuscany is entirely doable, and Lucca itself remains one of Tuscany's most underrated walled cities.
