Castello di Vincigliata

Having fun on the internet last night I stumbled across a photograph of the Castello di Vincigliata. I thought, hey, that's cool, I wonder if it's real? That turned out to be a complicated and interesting question. The castello is in Tuscany, near the village of Fiesole.

These days the castle's web site promotes it as

one of the most romantic and beautiful wedding venues, only a few km from the centre of Florence. Plunged among the rolling Tuscan hills, it is the ideal place for celebrating your special day.

So, you know, if you were thinking of getting married in Tuscany, give them a call. Just out of curiosity, would you find out for me how much it costs?

The castle's own web site reveals that this is no pristine medieval construction. As they put it,

In 1840 Sir John Temple leader was exploring the hill of Fiesole,when he came upon the overgrown ruin of a medieval castle. He instantly fell in love with it and decided to restore it to its former glory. Of the many stories he uncovered, Sir John especially coveted the one about Donna Bianca.

Sir John decided that Vincigliata was a perfect place to host his many noble friends. With the help of a young architect Fancelli, he started the daunting task of restoration. In pure spirit of renaissance patronage, he commissioned 80 masons, artisans, sculptors, glassmakers and antiquarians and with their help, Vincigliata was reborn after 10 years of work.

So this was really built in the 1840s. But how extensive were those ruins that started Sir John dreaming? Wikipedia tells us that  under Temple's ownership the castle was "entirely reconstructed in the feudal style."

These two drawings are the only records I have found of what was here when Sir John's builders set to work. They are enough, though, to show that quite a bit remained, so this is far from a complete fantasy. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc did some of his "restorations" with less. So who built the castle that Sir John found in ruins?

According, again, to the castle web site, there has been a noble residence on this spot since at least 1031. And that's pretty much all the castle's web site has to say about the site's early history. I did track down one halfway learned source, a brief article in Italian, which confirms that there was a medieval house here. In fact there is an estate inventory of 1335 that describes the place as

medietas pro indiviso cuiusdam resedii cum turre, curte, giardino, terra laborativa, puteo, e arboribus positum in populi Sancte Marie de Vincigliata comitatis Florentiae, loco dicto ala torre

That is, a house with tower, wall, garden, fields, well, and woods in the parish of St. Mary de Vincigliata in the county of Florence. So there was something fairly impressive here by 1335. However, our author (Alessandro Rinaldi) does not think that describes our house. He seems to think that whatever was there before was mostly swept away after 1365, when the property fell into the hands of the Alessandri family.

The Alessandri family were Florentine aristocrats, a wealthy clan that produced numerous senators and the like in the 1300s and 1400s. One of their town houses, the Palazzo Allessandri, still stands

and they once owned a famous piece of furniture, the Alessandri Table. They show up among the patrons of various Florentine artists, and Vassari says that one of their infants was the model for a famous baby Jesus. Anyway, they were rich and stylish.

Photo from a set posted by one of my favorite bloggers, Vertigo 1871

They were not, however, soldiers. Or knights. They were merchants. Of course like most rich merchants of that era they spent some of their profits buying land, both as a safe investment and by way of elbowing their way into the old aristocracy. And what did you, a merchant trying to pass as a nobleman, build on the country estate with the money you made in banking or trade? Why, a castle!

Like this one, described in a will of 1429 as "a Lordly palace with battlements and subterranean vaults, with an outer wall." Our man Rinaldi calls this new structure

an eloquent expression of the neo-feudal aspirations and mentality of the Florentine aristocracy of the 15th century.

It just tickles me that our nineteenth-century English romantic, full of neo-feudal aspirations, rebuilding a castle as a place to entertain and impress his friends, was following so closely in the footsteps of the fifteenth-century Alessandri, who were also building a sort of lark instead of a fortress.

And Donna Bianca? She was a young woman of the house who was loved by two brothers. Like a proper folk tale heroine, she chose to marry the younger. She was sitting at the tower window on her wedding morning, waiting for her betrothed to arrive, when she saw him coming down the road. Just before he reached the gate his older brother and two other men leaped from behind trees and killed him before her eyes. Of course, she leaped to her death.