The steward of a Tuscan estate on continuity, obligation, and the difference between keeping an old place alive and merely preserving it.
The house stands at the end of a long white-gravel drive between two files of cypress, and it has belonged to the same family for longer than anyone can state with confidence. She took over its care a little more than a decade ago, and she is careful about the verb. She did not inherit it, she says. She was entrusted with it, which is a different thing and a heavier one.
“The house has had many people like me,” she says, on a terrace where the stone is still warm at six in the evening. “Each of us gets a chapter. The task is to hand it on in better condition than we found it, and not to mistake our chapter for the book.”
Keeping, not preserving
Her first lesson was that a house kept exactly as it was will not survive. Roofs fail. Families divide. Estates that refuse to adapt tend to be sold, split into lots or left to a slow and picturesque decline.
“Preservation is for museums,” she says. “A house must be lived in, and living means change. The only question is which changes it can absorb without ceasing to be itself.”
In practice that has meant years of unglamorous decisions: rebuilding drainage that had silently rotted the foundations of one wing; relaying the terracotta roofs tile by tile, the sound ones kept and the broken ones matched; replanting olive terraces abandoned for a generation; converting two barns so that the estate can earn its keep rather than drain it.
“Continuity is not standing still. It is choosing, carefully, what to carry forward.”
What the land knows
The groves and vines matter more to her than the rooms. The land, she points out, was worked long before the house was raised and will outlast any building on it.
She spends much of the year outdoors, walking the terraces with the people who tend them — several from families that have worked the same slopes for generations. Pruning, harvest and replanting are decided together, and usually slowly.
“They know things about this land that are written nowhere,” she says. “Which corner floods after a storm, which slope ripens first, which old tree has always been difficult and should be left to its moods. If I ignored that knowledge I would be managing a spreadsheet, not an estate.”
In late autumn, when the olives come in, the whole household works the harvest. She describes the first pressing, green and peppery, as the only day of the year when she allows herself to feel that the place belongs, however briefly, to her.
Opening the doors
For a long time the house was wholly private. She has opened it gradually — an occasional concert in the courtyard, small dinners under the loggia, guests in a restored farmhouse at the edge of the vines. It was not an easy decision, and she weighed it for several years.
“The fear is that visitors will wear the place out,” she says. “The opposite has happened. A house with no one in it begins to die. Rooms need voices. Gardens need people walking through them, noticing what has gone wrong.”
The limits are firm. The family rooms remain closed. Numbers stay small. Every guest is received in person, and the tone is that of a visit rather than an admission.
The next chapter
She has already begun to think about who will follow her, and she approaches the question without sentiment. The right steward, she believes, is not necessarily the obvious heir. It is whoever understands that the role is a responsibility first and a privilege a distant second.
“I would like to leave three things,” she says. “A sound roof, productive land, and a written account of why every major decision was made. The first two anyone can see. The third is the one that will actually help.”
As the light goes, she walks us back down the drive. The cypresses lay long bars of shadow across the gravel. “Someone planted these knowing they would never see them grown,” she says. “That is the whole idea, really.”
