History of Lo Stallino
In the early 1970s, the Chianti region was a very different place than it is today. Still recovering from World War II, its dwindling population continued to flee the poverty of the countryside in search of better opportunities in the cities. Abandoned stone farmhouses dotted the terraced hillsides, crumbling vestiges of the millennia-old sharecropping system known as the mezzadria. In the mid-sixties, artists and writers from England and northern Europe, attracted by the isolation and rugged beauty of the region with its long and fascinating history, began to buy up and renovate the derelict farmhouses. Within a decade, the foreign population had grown, lured by the low real estate prices and the simple lifestyle. Their presence brought prosperity to the area reinvigorating the wine and olive oil industry and catalyzing the birth of a new generation of skilled craftsmen and artisans who were employed to renovate the farmhouses as retirement homes and holiday retreats. Borro al Fumo, and its guesthouse Lo Stallino, date to the 18th possibly the 17th century and was home to successive sharecropper families working on the aristocratic estates of Brolio and Ama. The house was abandoned in 1962 and bought by my father in 1970. For the next 29 years, he spent the better part of each year restoring the two houses and creating a beautiful garden.
Eventually, my wife and I assumed ownership of Borro al Fumo and, in 2006, we completely renovated the old stable – Lo Stallino – in order to make it our guesthouse.
Early photographs of the Stallino in the 1970s
