We spent the rest of the day at Spannocchia. We had signed up for the Castello tour, and weren't about to miss it!
The tour was given by Randall, one of the owners. The estate had been in his wife's family for a number of generations, and they moved back here from the US to fix it up and turn it into the eductional place that it is today.
Randall is quite the historian, and in going on his tour we learned a lot about the estate, but also about Tuscany and Italy in general as well.
The estate began in the 1100s when the Spannocchias, a very successful banking family, acquired the land. They lived in the upper floors of the tower that you see that is still so prominent in the massing of the villa. By the 1400s they no longer needed to live in the tower and so started expanding the building into what we see today. More was added in the 1700s, and finally the wine terrace was built in the 1920s-30s. By 1918 the last member of the Spannocchia family left, and it was sold to the Cinelli family, who were hatmakers and the ancestors of Randall's wife. The Cinellis moved back and forth between Italy and the US. Randall's wife was born in the US, and that's where they met, and only later did they decide to move back here.
That's the story in a nutshell!
Really, though, there's so much more wrapped up into that tale. While Randall only scratched the surface, what he explained to us was so much more than I knew before!
One larger story is about the family living in the tower. During the Middle Ages wealthy families had to defend themselves rather than rely on a larger system of law enforcement. Many had towers such as this one, that they called home. (I guess it gives new meaning to the saying "a man's home is his castle"!) This is why San Gimignano looks like a city of medieval skyscrapers. While most have fallen or been torn down in the intervening centuries, San Gimignano still has a number of them left, although even there it's just a fraction of those that once stood!
Another is the
mezzadria, or sharecropping system, which was in place in this region from the 1100s until it started to disintegrate after World War II. A wealthy family would acquire a large piece of land, and rent out subdivisions of it to sharecroppers. As payment, the farmers would have to give the landowner half of everything they produced. Such a high price prevented the tenants from rising above a subsistence level.
The property was called a
Tenuta, or estate. The landowner would live in a villa, and the tenants has their own homes on the property, which were the farmhouses. In the case of Spannocchia, some of the farmhouses are right next to the villa, such as where we were staying. Others are further away, such as those we passed on our walks. There typically would have been 20-60 farmhouses under each villa.
Randall was very explicit about the differences between villas and farmhouses, and not because he happens to be the landowner. It bothers him tremendously that every house in Tuscany is marketed as a villa. Not only is it false advertising to the tourists who spend good money to stay "in a Tuscan villa", but it completely disregards its meaning in the history of the region.
The Tenutas were in many respects self-contained worlds, and as the land revolved around the villas, the mezzadria system had a profound effect on the land use patterns of Tuscany, and shaped the landscape that we see today.
Tuscany has very strict preservation laws, especially for the countryside. They recognize that the landscape they have is very unique, and to protect it, nothing new may be built. Alterations must pass through the preservation board. I'm not sure how this applies to land ownership, that is, if the land may be subdivided into smaller farms (perhaps to the size rented by each family previously?), or if the estates must also remain intact. New construction may happen in the towns, which is why we saw the factory in Taverna d'Arbia and passed by gas stations and grocery stores, just not in the countryside.
The mezzadria system, for as awful as it sounds, was a driving force behind the Renaissance and the transformation to the Modern Age. The landowners were successful families in the cities. Banking and commerce became important industries in Siena and Florence. The families in these two fields invested in land and country villas. With the wealth they acquired in town and from their tenants they financed the artists, musicians, poets, etc. I'm not sure that I understand the full story or the cause and effect correctly, but in some way, the Renaissance was fueled by the labor of these subsistence farmers.
The mezzadria system didn't start dying out until there was an alternative way to earn a living, which came to Italy with industrialization starting around World War II. At this point many farmers left to go work in factories, and society became much more mobile, much as it did a few generations earlier in other countries. At Spannocchia there were still 30 families living here in the 1960s and 70s. By 1981 there were 6 families left, and the last family left in 1986. So the shift away from subsistence farming happened only very recently.
In the 1950s and '60s the nonprofit Etruscan Foundation used Spannocchia as housing for the American students who came here for archaeological digs. They uncovered all kinds of Etruscan, Roman and medieval artifacts. Technically, all these things belong to the Italian government, but since there are more artifacts all over the country than they know what to do with, they remain here to this day.
When Randall and his wife came here they wanted to preserve and restore the buildings. They realized the buildings made no sense without preserving the landscape as well, which meant cultivating it. Unfortunately that is not a very economically viable thing to do, so they had to be creative about the way they went about things.
For example, they raise the Cinta Sinese pigs we met the day before. The government gives them a grant per animal because they are an endangered heritage breed.
Everything they do is done with the aim of being a viable working farm that preserves the local traditions while using organic and sustainable methods. For example, they plant two crops in each field. They plant a cover crop in the off-season. It is then broken down and the actual crop is planted at the same time. As the cover crop decomposes it fertilizes the actual crop. Thus synthetic fertilizers are not needed and they only need two passes of the tractor, as compared to the conventional nine.
Of course, "sustainable" doesn't mean "self-contained." They sell much of what they produce, including their olive oil, prosciutto and wine, and they earn money through tourists like us staying there. (This is the agriturismo part.) But they also serve as an educational model. Interns work there for three months at a time, and classes come here for shorter time periods.
There is nowhere else quite like this place, but there are a handful of places in the world (really, like 3 or 4) that are trying similar arrangements. They are in close contact with a group in Shelburne, VT, and they know of one in the UK and one in Japan. I didn't realize how innovative this place is!
We got to see the Cantina, where the wine is made. There are four types of grapes that were traditionally used for Chianti: two red and two white, in varying proportions. Nobody uses the white grapes for Chianti anymore- it is very acidic this way- so at Spannocchia they separate them out into two different wines; they produce 3500 bottles of red and 2000 bottles of white every year!
Next we got to see the Frantoio, where the olive oil is produced. To do this the olives are ground into a paste, then they are pressed so the oil is squeezed out. What remains is the consistency of sawdust, and is used as an industrial fuel.
The old press was turned by a donkey walking around and around in circles here.
Later they used this press.
Today they take the olives to a modern press off-site. It is much cleaner and more efficient, and produces a much better quality oil.
We got to walk around and through the villa, and got a better sense of the where the different building alterations stopped and started.
There is a chapel inside the villa. All the tenants would come here on Sunday- in a way, each Tenuta functioned as its own little village! The landowners would sit in the screened in area to the left, so they didn't have to mingle with the peasants. I found a bit of irony here: at the Basilica, the slaves sat in the west balcony so they were segregated from all the white people in the main nave space. I think they had the best seats in the house- my favorite views of the Basilica are from the west balcony! Here, the aristocracy segregated themselves and took, in my opinion anyway, the
worst seats!
We climbed up inside the tower next. There isn't much (or any?) physical evidence of how it was originally occupied, and Randall is searching to see if there is anything he can find out about it.
The view from the top of the tower was really nice!
Here's the drive in the foreground, which loops around to the left behind the tree to the front entrance of the villa and our farmhouse. Also: the swimming pool, which we never used, and the old pig stalls turned into pottery studios. In the background is the half-eaten-away hillside of the marble quarry across the road from the drive into Spannocchia. This is very upsetting to the locals, including Randall: under the strict preservation laws, nothing like this is supposed to be allowed except for special circumstances. The marble quarry claims that it quarries a very unique yellow marble which is very valuable, and that is why it must be there. Apparently, though, they produce little more than gravel, not a very special circumstance at all!
This is looking over the front entrance and our farmhouse- the drive comes in past the tree in the previous photo and enters this photo from the right. Our little car is second from the right.
This is looking out over the main yard. The garden wall and the garden are off to the right of this picture. To the left is the main drive coming up along the main wall. (This is looking in the opposite direction from the marble quarry photo.) Directly below the tower in this photo, in the little semi-enclosed courtyard is where we were going to have dinner following the tour. As a part of the changes made in the 1700s, the marble bedrock in this courtyard area (previously the front entrance) was excavated down almost a full story, to level out the land. The stone was used to build the garden wall. The yard and the main wall to the left were considerably lengthened, to create a grand, forced perspective. The family and their guests would enter through the gate at the far end of this photo, and come up the drive on the right.
Their entrance to the villa would have seemed that much more majestic as a result!
The extent of the bedrock excavation can still be clearly seen along the main wall.
That was the tour! We went downstairs and had wine on the terrace with everyone, then sat down at the tables in the little courtyard for dinner! This was the night we ate with the whole group, as we did the night we arrived. The food was fantastic! It was all prepared and served by the interns here with Spannocchia-grown ingredients. Yum!
We sat with a whole group of architecture students from Kansas who were just at the beginning of their week's stay here. They had taken a similar Castello tour, and had done a bit of travelling so far as well. They were also honing their masonry skills by rebuilding some of the crumbling site walls on the property! After their stay at Spannocchia they were going to Chur to see some Peter Zumthor buildings. (I was a wee bit jealous!) One girl was in complete awe of the age of things here, and marveled at how you can read things in the ghosting on the walls! Hm. I wonder if we'll get a resume from her at some point? :)
