Castello di Fonterutoli ★☆☆

A suite

In the heart of Tuscany’s Chianti Classico region, at the top of a rise along the road from Castellina to Siena, is the small village of stone houses and flowering vines that has been home to the Mazzei Marquises since 1435. Just down the main street, across from the enoteca (wine bar) serving the estate’s fine wines, is a shop window displaying a blown-up copy of a 40¢ U.S. postage stamp. It says “Philip Mazzei, Patriot Remembered” and honors family ancestor Filippo Mazzei, one of the unsung fathers of our country. 

After meeting Ben Franklin in London, the Tuscan doctor and merchant decided to bring viticulture to Virginia in 1773 and ended up becoming one of the intellectual luminaries of the Revolutionary movement. In a series of firebrand letters to a The Virginia Gazette (translated from Italian by his multitalented neighbor Thomas Jefferson), the planter and revolutionary once wrote that “All men are, by nature, equally free and independent”—a sentiment Jefferson later paraphrased into: “all men are created equal.” Filippo’s adventures eventually led him to Poland, Russia, and France, but most of the Mazzei clan was happy to remain in Tuscany, tending their 289 acres of vineyards as they have for 24 generations. 

A wonderful example of the kind of old, centralized aristocratic agricultural estate that has vanished from much of Italy, Fonterutoli has been preserved largely because the Mazzei still own, operate, and inhabit it.

Of course, these days it no longer take a village full of peasants to run even a large farm, so the Marquis has converted several of the old houses into rental apartments and B&B rooms and installed a swimming pool with vineyard views. Three of the apartments share the elongated village square with the family villa and San Miniato church. The lodgings are large, simple, and genuine. The sizeable rooms of stone walls, working fireplaces, open-beamed ceilings, and terracotta floors are filled with nondescript, slightly battered furnishings that are old without being antique—just like a real home.

A fourth unit, named “Roseto” for the rose bushes climbing its walls, occupies the upper story of the house just off the piazza where the Marquis’s grandchildren live. Inside it’s an odd but pleasing mix of post-modern, antique, and Asian décor, and while it can be rented as an apartment for a party of six, it usually operates as a three-room B&B. Well-placed windows and skylights in the common room and large kitchen fill it with sunlight, and each double bedroom has its own bathroom and private entrance.

There are three more apartments—named after local grapes and wines: Galestro, Malvasia, and Sangiovese—located a mile and a half from the main village in the satellite hamlet of Il Caggio, home to several farmworkers and Fonterutoli’s wine cellars.

Other than a lack of washing machines and slightly lower rates, there’s little to set these lodgings apart from the ones up in the village.

Rates vary according to season and room size.

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