How Castellina in Chianti was built and evolved over time

The fortress was a commission, documented in an archive. At the start of the fifteenth century the Florentines decided to fortify this frontier, continually raided by soldiery, with a wall circuit and a rocca. Responsibility for building it went to the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore of Florence, and that body's archive records precisely what was wanted. The dimensions of the building show the design was carried out meticulously.

The plan is simple and military. The rest of the cassero circuit was built up against the tower, and the inner court divided in two: one part held the stair to the tower, the other a ricetto for the foot soldiers.

The masonry is local and graded. The rocca is built of dressed blocks of alberese and sandstone laid in horizontal courses, with the best and best-worked stones reserved for the corners and the jambs of the openings. The works ran on for some decades and probably finished around the middle of the century.

The silhouette, though, is a hundred years old, not six. The comune acquired the rocca in the 1920s and the architect Egisto Bellini carried out a radical ripristino in the then-fashionable manner of the restauri imitativi, aimed at recovering a presumed original appearance. It was then that the building got its merlons, its wall-walk with corner bertesche and its campaniletto a vela; inside, the so-called sala del capitano, with a fireplace and a washbasin whose marble front carries the arms of the Tolomei.

The walls themselves are mostly gone. Of the fifteenth-century circuit the north side survives best, where the semi-basement wall-walk — today's Via delle Volte — is excellently preserved, and where torri rompitratta were set for flanking fire. The south side has disappeared entirely; it is on that side that the Rocca stands. Of the two gates, the porta Senese and the porta Fiorentina, neither survives.