Fonterutoli site features

It is one street and a view. The borgo sits on the Chiantigiana south of Castellina, and what it offers first is the panorama: Siena on the horizon, the Sienese Valdelsa falling away below. That sightline is not incidental — it is why a boundary was argued over here.

The fabric is largely as it was. The appearance of the place has not changed much across the centuries, and some of the original constructions are still standing. The one substitution is the biggest: the original castle was replaced by the villa padronale at the end of the 16th century.

The villa has Italian gardens, and they are the formal counterweight to a hamlet that is otherwise working buildings.

The church is San Miniato, inside the borgo.

A plaque in the middle of the village dates the place. It recalls 998, when Otto III put an end to the contests between the powerful dioceses of Siena, Fiesole and Arezzo, establishing boundaries and possessions. Another plaque records the stay of Giorgio La Pira; the lane through the hamlet is Via Ottone di Sassonia — Otto of Saxony — named for the emperor of the first.

Under the modern surface is a very large wine estate. The company covers 650 hectares, of which 110 are specialised vineyard in seven zones between 220 and 570 metres, divided into 114 parcels, interleaved with marginal crops and woods. The soil is the same pair of stones the fortress and the tombs are built of: the breakdown of alberese and sandstone has given this land, in the estate's own words, a stony, complex soul.

The legend of the two knights

During the wars between Siena and Florence, Fonterutoli was the seat of the agreements that ended the dispute over the Chianti territories. The story told of those agreements is that the boundary should be set at the meeting point of a Florentine knight and a Sienese knight, each to set out from his city at the first crowing of the cock — and the two met near Fonterutoli. It is the origin story of the black cockerel that badges Chianti Classico, and the source presents it as a tale.

998, and a plaque

A plaque in the centre of the borgo records that in 998 the emperor Otto III ended the contests between the dioceses of Siena, Fiesole and Arezzo, establishing boundaries and possessions. Fonterutoli has been a place where borders get decided for a thousand years.

One family since 1435

The castle of Fonterutoli has been the property of the marchesi Mazzei since 1435 — a continuity of nearly six centuries, and the reason the hamlet has changed so little.

A cellar built on gravity

The Cantina di Fonterutoli was designed by Agnese Mazzei on three levels of depth, so that grapes gathered on the yard above descend through vinification and wood maturation by gravity. It holds 74 truncated-cone steel tanks of 100 hectolitres, one parcel at a time; fifteen metres down, a barrel cellar with over 3,000 oak casks, where temperature and humidity are held by five water tables running naturally down the exposed rock walls. It belongs to the Toscana Wine Architecture circuit of fourteen design wineries.

Italian gardens and a church

The villa Mazzei with its giardini all'italiana, and the chiesa di San Miniato, both inside the borgo.

Etruscan tombs in the wood

The necropoli del Poggino is in a grove in this locality: four visible chamber tombs joined by a path, used from the end of the 7th century BC to the 5th, and free to visit. The museum in Castellina names the Poggino di Fonterutoli among the aristocratic burials of the Etruscan princes of the Chianti.