Badia a Coltibuono

Family mission in Chianti

Badia a Coltibuono has been linked to the Giuntini/Stucchi-Prinetti family since 1846.

As many as six generations have succeeded one another in the ownership, always with passion and respect for their roots and extraordinary history. A strong and heartfelt commitment not only for the Abbey itself but, in a broader sense, for the entire beautiful Chianti region that surrounds it, with its people, traditions and places: a form of active and sensitive participation in conservation, understood in the most respectful and modern sense.
In this place where, a thousand years ago, monks developed sustainable methods of cultivating the land, the Stucchi family today continues its commitment to organic farming, with the aim of keeping the land healthy and usable for future generations.
The extensive work to maintain the forests is planned with this in mind: here, too, biodiversity is a heritage to be preserved. Together with the paths and white roads that cross them; a fragile heritage, but of fundamental importance for the Chianti landscape. They are not simply paths, but true pilgrimage routes, important transport arteries since Etruscan, Roman and mediaeval times, dotted with small, precious monuments, hermitages, chapels... Routes that allow us to contemplate a landscape that is characterised by an irreproducible relationship, woven over the centuries, between beauty, history and culture

The Origins

Badia a Coltibuonowhere Chianti was born

A case more unique than rare Badia a Coltibuono still preserves its original structure: in 1051 the monk Giovanni Gualberto received the church of San Lorenzo a Coltibuono as a gift from powerful local feudal lords with the order to build an annexed residence for the clergy and a hospice for pilgrims. A community of Benedictine monks took up residence there, which immediately enjoyed high esteem thanks to its reforming and polemical spirit with regard to the rampant corruption of the clergy, and soon assumed a pre-eminent religious, political, social and economic role.
Already in the first decades, numerous spontaneous donations of large properties by the aristocracy and modest plots of land by poor peasants, who sought shelter and protection in a turbulent historical epoch, ensued. Badia a Coltibuono thus attained a remarkable ownership structure that, remarkably enough, was never again dispersed or divided up in the centuries to follow.