Discovering Sammezzano Castle

A treasure of colour and wonder, nestled in Valdarno, ready for rebirth

The Sammezzano Castle, located in Reggello (Florence) and in a state of abandonment for almost thirty years, finally has a new owner: Smz Srl, traceable to the Florentine entrepreneur Giorgio Moretti, founder of Angeli del Bello. The Moretti family has set itself the goal of returning the castle and its centuries-old park - almost 200 hectares - to the community and the Italian cultural heritage as soon as possible. Decisive for the turnaround was the commitment of Moretti's daughter, Ginevra, who played a key role in convincing her father to start the restoration project.

Exploring a region as rich in extraordinary artistic treasures as Tuscany. Aim your gaze at the Castle of Sammezzano. The vast mansion dominates the southern slope of the Vallombrosa mountain, overlooking the severe Valdarno countryside with a certain feudal haughtiness. It constitutes a territory entirely given over to fantasy.

Absolute uniqueness, for the weave of extraordinary suggestions and the unrepeatable ornamental flourish that surprisingly hides behind the severe walls. An authentic fairy-tale vision desired, starting in the mid-19th century, by Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d'Aragona, client and architect at the same time.

But Sammezzano is not just a sort of anastatic print of the Alhambra in Granada and its fairy-tale Islamic seductions. Nor does it merely give life to a scenic representation warped by the infinite, unexpected decorative inventions that follow one another room after room.

Well, there is much more to this imaginative and sumptuous, cultured and, almost at times, ‘Disneyesque’ folly. Meanwhile, who was Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes of Aragon? The Tuscan gentleman, who inherited the possession of Sammezzano in 1843 at the end of a long and contentious legal vicissitude, dedicated the rest of his life to the transfiguration of what until then had been a simple nobleman's villa ‘nel popolo di San Salvatore al Leccio’.

A unicum then. A stage of eclecticism and literary and stylistic contaminations, where the incipit is given by the dazzling and embroidered white of the ‘Hall of the Lovers’, in which Gothic and Moorish forms intertwine, to then explode happily, without a moment's respite, in the chromatic, technical and material phantasmagoria of the subsequent rooms.

Halls and salons, every atrium and corridor are animated by an immense desire for ornamentation that draws sap from the syntax of the Moorish artistic language. Sammezzano is therefore both dream and nightmare at the same time, exciting fiction and historicist accumulation, opulent set and speculative buen retiro.