Lifestyle Flow Node

Villa Cetinale

Sovicille, Tuscany, Italy

Legendary · held by 167 collectors

Villa Cetinale is the most architecturally and historically complete of the privately owned Tuscan villas available for exclusive rental — a 17th-century baroque property in the hills southwest of Siena, designed in 1680 by Carlo Fontana (architect to Pope Clement X, who commissioned the villa for his nephew Cardinal Flavio Chigi) and subsequently famous for the Hermitage (a small religious hermitage built behind the property on the hillside above), the Scala Sancta (a staircase of 242 steps ascending to the hermitage, lined by penitents' prayers and used as a place of meditation), and the formal gardens that descend from the villa's piano nobile through a sequence of box-hedged parterres to the valley below. The villa's history of extended ownership — by the Chigi family from the 17th century, subsequently by Lord Lambton and Lady Anne Lambton whose 30-year residency and development of the gardens brought international creative and political figures to Cetinale through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and subsequently by subsequent owners who have maintained the property's character — creates a guest history that constitutes an informal index of the Anglo-Italian creative and political network of the past four decades. As a Lifestyle Flow Node, Villa Cetinale maps the class of Tuscan properties whose intelligence value derives from the quality of the time spent within the landscape rather than the property itself: Tuscany's specific combination of managed agricultural landscape (the cypress allee, the olive grove, the vineyard producing a private estate wine whose quantity is insufficient for commercial distribution but appropriate for a week's house party consumption), Renaissance art geography (Siena cathedral, the San Galgano abbey ruins, the Pienza piazza), and the Italian table's domestic expression at its most unpretentious create a week-long experiential structure whose components reinforce each other in a way that resort hospitality cannot replicate.

Tuscany · Italy · Heritage · Gardens · History