Love at first sight

Not just people, they fool us. Places also disrupt us. Just like people. Love at first sight, they call it. You look at one / one, to all the others he says little, or nothing, and instead he talks a lot to you. You arrive in a place that has already been someone else’s home, a shabby estate, a ruin to be restored. Something stings you inside and you have no escape, you already know it: that is where your energies – emotional, economic, psychic – will go best. Let’s think about Fabrizio De André e Dori Ghezzi, when in 1975 they stumbled upon that shepherds’ farmhouse which became their harsh and poetic abode in candlelit nights without a telephone, lost in fifty mixed hectares of woods, crops, streams: the first rooms of their daughter Luvi, today the Agnata .

It must have happened like this, it certainly did with the Silicon Valley tycoon, philanthropist and writer Michael Moritz when with his wife Harriet Heyman from the San Francisco bay it happened to Borgo Pignano, and he found in his eyes an ancient manor house of the eighteenth century, with a Romanesque church, in total abandonment, and the Tuscan countryside that cradles Volterra and San Gimignano, and a valley of blackberry brambles, hay bales and dilapidated maisonettes has created an eco paradise of plowed fields, vines and cypresses against cobalt skies, a luxury hotel that stands in a time almost suspended between the eco-sustainable refuge, the farm and the journey into art, beauty, protected nature and irresistible.

Great works of care are felt even in the small details, in massages with the essence of lavender and cypress, in horseback riding through the 300-hectare reserve, in the baths in an infinity pool dug in a tuff quarry, in organic flours for the preparation of bread and pasta as well as boxes from the garden with eggs, vegetables, fruit, aromatic herbs, cold-pressed olive oil, wine and honey. The impression of being inside an incredible kingdom: going slowly, silence and the scents of the past.

It must have happened like this, it certainly did with the actor Luca Calvani, today director (his will soon be in the cinema The cacio con le pere) and entrepreneur, who – always in Tuscany, but in Versilia where he spent his summers as a child – one day turned a curve with Alessandro, and found himself in front of Le Gusciane, a house that is just as we drew them as children: during the day as a fairy tale by Hansel and Gretel, at night as a painting by Magritte.

In a dream greenhouse, the morning light filters in, you dine barefoot on the grass, breakfast is served on an antique pink and wooden table, of the grandparents returning from the war, in the beehives inside the woods where the Via Francigena passes the bees produce a honey that can be “adopted”, as it was for the olive trees of the olive grove (a name and a verse for each tree), gin is at home (Helichrysum) as well as essences and soaps (Apuania ).

It must have happened this way, it certainly did, to the communications consultant Fulvio Zendrini, that in the home of a long-time commander on the hills overlooking the ancient fishing village of Camogli he created with his partner Mario Pietraccetta Villa Rosmarino, a charming maison on the gulf: not a hotel, rather a paradise of the senses, a hymn to decoration outside and minimalism inside (few guests, including camellias, climbing roses and pomegranates).

17th century base, of which an old mill remains, with the olive press, the last century residence of an old admiral, long-time commander, who loved to come here to rest after long sea crossings: the beams that hold the roof and the floors are still those of that time, made with the masts of the ships that today overlook the fiery sunsets of Portofino.