In 1926 Countess Elena Castelbarco and her husband Fabio Sanminiatelli moved to Vignamaggio, where they lived for many years. They gave the villa new splendour, restored its gardens and invited distinguished guests to cultural and social events at the villa.
Fabio “Bino” Sanminiatelli (Florence, 1896-1984), writer, journalist and artist, devoted much of his writing to the Tuscan countryside, to the changes that swept through farming, and to recording the end of the sharecropping system. In his novels and letters he described the Chianti landscape with careful elegance and realism, losing himself in the woods, following the springs of the Greve and letting himself be charmed every day by the scents and customs of country life.
Bino’s study is still steeped in an atmosphere of deep calm and familiarity. The writer’s notes, cuttings and keepsakes turn up at the back of a drawer or between the pages of a book.


Quiet moments that we wanted to share with you, in the writer’s own words.
“The farm, built into the villa, rests on massive buttressed walls. The venerable vegetation around it, all that remains of the almost vanished Italian garden that I had wanted to bring closer to the woods by way of the cypress avenue, is made up of pines and holm oaks, once clipped into hedges. In green niches hide old, chipped statues and a little temple from which the Gods have withdrawn.
The hill to which the villa and the farm cling rises from the valley where the stream roars and the mists gather. Great walls and courtyards, chapel, shop, stable, cellar, olive press: everything is shut in as if in a Noah’s ark for the long winter crossing. And rooms and little rooms for the vin santo, the cheese, the oil jars, the charcoal: and vaults and little stairways climbing through the rock. On winter evenings the small colony sets sail into its night.”
La vita in campagna, Longanesi, 1980.
Scrittori del Chianti, Centri Studi Chiantigiani Clante, 1998.

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