A brief history
Some places exist where, owing to a series of favorable factors, the significance of much further outspread lands moulds together, because it is there that everyday events have turned into history.The Castle of San Donato in Perano is one of these places: from its dominant position it overlooks the gentle hills of Tuscany, famous throughout the world for their beautiful landscapes and for the excellent quality of their particular wine: Chianti.
"a Landlord's
Villa
with chapel
kitchen garden,
oil mill,
lawn,
dovecot,
cold larder
and
outhouses..."
The toponymy stands witness to the Etruscan origin of the ancient settlement (Peras) that, over the centuries, has seen it become a Roman farm of the republican age, a country villa during the imperial age, and a curtis in the Middle Ages.
Around the year 1000 the little village that for centuries had clustered close to a chapel dedicated to San Donato, was fortified and incorporated into the network of medieval Chianti castles. The bishop of Arezzo, who was martyred by the pagans in the 4th century A.D. is said to have miraculously recomposed a shattered glass chalice It was towards the middle of the 15th century that this ancient hamlet, surrounded by a double circle of defensive walls and located at the center of a fertile agricultural district, became a wealthy landlord's country residence.
It was purchased around the middle of the 16th century by the Strozzi, one of the most important Florentine families, concerned at the time with establishing an economic structure such as to guarantee the profitability of their agricultural property and consequently the strength of their political power and social prestige.
The reasons were that, starting from the '50s, the crisis of the "mezzadria" (sharecropping) system and the progressive moving of country folk into the towns had created serious problems and made it extremely costly to pass from a traditional type of economy to another of modern conception by which agricultural investments and country life could become dynamic and productive. But a different agricultural layout, founded on planting for specialized products, has led in recent years to a new structure of the agriculture at San Donato in Perano, combining the district's traditional vocation for wine and for olive oil with a sophisticated conception of hospitality.
The Castle of San Donato in Perano, with its residences where the most refined care has been taken to preserve style, with its surrounding countryside cultivated according to an age-old, yet completely up-dated, custom, its landscapes of gentle slopes and wild woods, offers the experience of an immersion in a neighborhood in which "where" and "when" come together, merging into what in Latin was known as "genius loci". It could be just by chance, of course, that not far from here are the birthplaces and were the workshops of geniuses such as Duccio, Leonardo, Michelangelo...
