Old Castellina was an Etruscan town situated at an altitude of 635 meters, halfway between Siena and Florence. It was once known as Salingolpe.
<When I was taken to visit the property before purchasing it, I saw, along with a nearly dilapidated farmhouse, a meager plot of land on the top of a hill 630 meters above sea level, where a dozen sheep grazed with difficulty. It was a plateau bordered by wild elms and ivy bushes growing on ancient, two-meter-thick dry stone walls.
Here and there, pieces of roof tiles, jar rims, loom weights, handles, and fragments of antique household pottery emerged.
My attention was heightened when, at the eastern end of the land, the seller (a poor Sicilian widow who had come to live in Chianti during the war), lifting some wooden planks, pointed out the opening of a chasm whose bottom was invisible.
Looking into this opening, she said: “It’s the well that hides the golden bells at the bottom.”
Perhaps this is also why I bought Casalvento a few days later.>
These were the words of Professor Giovanni Dòmini when he recalled the purchase of a humble farm during the years of the urbanization of rural life.
It was 1950, and an unstoppable economic and social transformation was already taking shape. But in those years, the value of that farm lay more in its past than in its present. On that hill, the city of Salingolpe had once existed.
It was nothing more than a castle, an oppidum founded by the Etruscans, which, over a span of 2,000 years, lasted until the 15th century AD.
It was later demolished and rebuilt lower down, where Castellina in Chianti now stands.
Within the surrounding walls, shepherds, farmers, and industrious artisans found protection and a water supply. Fresh, sweet water that trickled drop by drop into a deep well…