Cypress avenues have no drawbridges. If it were different, we would pull it up behind us and say goodbye to the noise and madness of the world in order to find our peace up there at the end of the avenue in our mountain village. Like an advance notice of heavenly peace, the Castello di Casole sits enthroned on a hill in the heart of Tuscany, well hidden from the hazards of life between Siena and Volterra, surrounded by a dream landscape like from the longing catalog of the faction of the same name. Our gaze wanders over a rolling landscape of wine and wheat and forests full of wild boars and truffles, peppered with dozens of hills on which other fortified villages reside, all proudly at eye level with ours, but none as beautiful as ours. Only the wind in the pine and cypress can be heardonly the cicadas give their concert tirelessly during the hot hours of the day in order to be detached from the birds in the twilight. Otherwise there is a silence in the Castello di Casole, which acts like a healing force in these hysterical days.

Jakob Strobel y Serra

Deputy head of the features section.

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People have lived on this hill for more than a thousand years.

In 998 they built a defensive tower to protect the pilgrims on the Via Francigena from highwaymen, this network of pilgrimage routes that stretched across the continent like the veins of faith from Canterbury to Rome.

A village grew out of the tower and a lordship with large agriculture all around, the ancestral seat of the House of Bargagli.

The pious family, which has several popes in its ancestral gallery, lived in a stately, finely plastered mansion in the Tuscan style, while the subjects had to be satisfied with buildings made of rubble and brick, which to us laypeople who are unconscious of their status seem almost more beautiful than the palazzo.

Five hundred people lived at the best of times in the Castello di Casole, which changed aristocratic owners a few times before it was bought in the 1950s by Edoardo Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, the older brother of the film director Luchino Visconti - and one second career began as a discrete stronghold of the Italian jet set, in which lavish parties were celebrated without paparazzi and superstars like Sofia Loren or Anna Magnani gave each other a hand.

God-fearing tribute to God's representative

The third and most democratic career of the Castello di Casone began in 2012: It opened its doors to all people who now did not have to bring fame or status as an entry ticket, but only a well-filled wallet to place themselves in the caring hands of the luxury travel company Belmond . For nine years it has owned and operated a very comfortable hotel on the hill, one of the most emblematic properties of this company of the finest addresses, which in turn belongs to the huge cosmos of the luxury company LVMH and in its portfolio alongside the nostalgic trains Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, Royal Scotsman, Eastern & Oriental Express brings together famous houses such as the Cipriani in Venice, the Splendido in Portofino or the Reid's in Madeira.

The outward appearance of the mountain village was not affected, which the Italian monument protection would not have tolerated. The manor house is still painted in the typical ocher yellow of Tuscany, pizzas are baked in the old oven from the seventeenth century to this day, and the village street with school and stables, church and parish, wine cellar and the orangery for the lemon trees looks so original that one involuntarily wonders where all the cows and the playing children have gone. But all of this is nothing but a beautiful appearance, because all corners of the fortified village have now been transformed into luxurious suites and apartments, while the spa has found shelter in the former barrel cellar - no longer feudal lords with their subjects live here, but guests from employees Wages are taken care of,this is how social progress is fun. Only the Bargagli's private chapel refuses to undergo metamorphosis and is still in the family's possession, closed, inaccessible, forbidding, perhaps a godly tribute to the representatives of God in the family tree.