. . . nomi seguitino le nominate cose . . .
. . . names are born of the things they name . . .
DANTE ALIGHIERI, LA VITA NUOVA
(TRANSLATION BY FRANCES DI SAVINO)
This is the story of the wine region once known simply as Chianti. But it is not a simple tale. With its many twists and turns, peaks and valleys, Chianti is a territory worthy of an epic. Framed by Florence to its north and Siena to its south, Chianti is a land of quintessential beauty and culture. It is the timeless paesaggio (landscape) in the background of a Renaissance painting. It is a land of castles, chapels, bell towers, farmhouses, hills, oaks, cypresses, olive groves, and vineyards. It is an authentic place which gave birth to an iconic (and then generic) wine, also known as Chianti. It is a wine region that is striving to reclaim its identity from the vast Tuscan appellation, which, by law, has the exclusive right to the name Chianti—and which we shall call External Chianti in these pages. Long before a Fascist-era ministerial decree officially designated it a vino tipico (wine type) in 1932, Chianti was valued as a special wine from the rocky hills of three river valleys between Florence and Siena in the heart of Tuscany: Val di Pesa, Val di Greve, and Val d’Arbia. This place, the original Chianti, now known as Chianti Classico, has been rooted in conflict for much of its history. Beginning in the twelfth century, Chianti was a battlefield, buffer, and border between these two warring city-states (and their respective proxies). Yet it was the dispute over the borders of the Chianti wine region in the twentieth century that came to be known as the Guerra del Chianti (War of Chianti). With the outbreak of this conflict in the early 1900s, Tuscany witnessed the birth of a field of scholarship aimed at answering the question What is Chianti? The resulting treatises mapped a multitude of Chiantis—Chianti storico (historic), geographico (geographic), geologico (geologic), enologico (enological), classico (classic), and commerciale (commercial).1 They reveal how zealously the forces of Chianti Classico and External Chianti waged their battles both on paper and in parliament. But for all of the politics, polemics, conflicts, and complexities that have whirled around Chianti, the original place has remained one of bucolic simplicity and historic richness. We begin our journey by exploring Chianti culturale (cultural). This story is our search for the true Chianti.
From its earliest days, Chianti has been shrouded in mystery. Historic maps of Tuscany (called Tyrrhenia, Etruria, and Tuscia during earlier epochs) do not consistently identify a region named Chianti. Rather, the place-name Chianti often appears somewhere north of Siena and in the vicinity of the townships of Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole2 and the Pesa and Arbia Rivers. Similarly, the origin of the name has yet to be discovered. It likely derives from a word in the language of the people who once controlled Etruria, the Etruscans.3 The Arno River to the north of Chianti was the natural boundary for northern Etruria. Since at least the seventh century b.c., Chianti was the entroterra (hinterland) of the Etruscan cities of Volterra to its west, Fiesole to its north, Arezzo to its east, and Siena and Chiusi to its south. Remarkably, Volterra, Fiesole, Arezzo, and Siena were four of the five dioceses of the Catholic Church that had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Chianti as of the Middle Ages (the fifth being Florence, which the Romans founded). In contrast with the later period of Roman rule, when the main north-south roads, the Francigena and the Cassia Nova, circumvented it, during the centuries of Etruscan rule, roadways connecting established urban centers crisscrossed Chianti. This “road map” provides interesting clues to the relationship of Chianti to the surrounding towns, even in the present day. One throughway ran northwest along the high ridge from the town of Radda, past the parish church (pieve) of Santa Maria Novella, then north past the town of Panzano, eventually turning west in the direction of Sambuca in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa.4 From this juncture another throughway branched north past the pieve of Santo Stefano in Campoli, on a hill between the Pesa and Greve River Valleys, then continued northwest toward the towns of Mercatale and San Casciano in Val di Pesa. A third one traveled from Volterra east to Castellina, then northeast to Lamole, and then to the Monti del Chianti (Chianti Mountains), where it intersected with the roadway that ran parallel to these mountains, leading north to the Arno River and south to the strategic city of Chiusi. This network of roadways, or “ridgeways,”5 suggests that there was an exchange of people and produce between Chianti and the Etruscan cities surrounding it. And indeed the Etruscan ruins discovered throughout Chianti provide ample evidence of this exchange.
In the main square of Castellina there is a small museum, Museo Archeologico del Chianti Senese, which is housed in the town’s medieval castle. Here many archaeological remnants of Chianti’s distant Etruscan past are on display. By one account, in January 1507 a farmer in Castellina was digging to plant a vineyard when he uncovered an Etruscan tomb containing many precious objects.6 These included wine wares and other ceramics associated with the Greek-inspired symposium (the after-dinner wine-drinking, poetry-reciting, music-playing, and other-pleasure-seeking ritual). Unlike the wine lovers of ancient Greece and Rome, the Etruscans invited their wives (and female relatives) to participate in their sacred symposia. Among the objects that the Etruscan Chiantigiani (native people of Chianti) used in their symposia were the bucchero kantharos (a wine goblet on a pedestal with two high, vertical-looped handles) and the kyathos (a one-handled wine cup or ladle). The kantharos was closely associated with the ritualistic worship of the Greek wine god, Dionysos (and the Etruscans’ wine god, Fufluns).7 The term bucchero refers to a typology of fine Etruscan black-fabric ceramics. The kantharos and kyathos objects on display in Castellina were made outside Chianti, in the more established Etruscan settlements of Chiusi, Orbetello, and Populonia (the last two both on the Tuscan coast).
In the middle of the seventh century b.c. the Etruscan aristocracy imported their prized wines from the Greek islands (such as Chios in the eastern Aegean) and the Turkish coast.8 By the end of that century, they had developed their own dynamic wine industry and culture. They exported their fine wine and bucchero wine wares throughout the entire Mediterranean region, including to coastal and central France, Spain, Greece, Syria, and Egypt. While the Etruscans adopted the ritual of the symposium and the style of many Greek ceramic wares, the bucchero kantharos and kyathos were strongly associated with Etruria and were imitated by ancient Greek (and Celtic) potters.9 Greek pottery commonly depicts Dionysos holding a bucchero kantharos.10 Bucchero wine wares and ceramics have been found in tombs and other Etruscan sites excavated throughout Chianti, including one on a steep hill in Gaiole called Cetamura (almost 700 meters, or 2,297 feet, above sea level), on the property of the present-day Chianti Classico wine estate Badia a Coltibuono. Whether the Etruscan Chiantigiani used their kantharoi, kyathoi, and other bucchero and bronze wine wares in the consumption of their native wine is not known. Archaeobotanic evidence of both the wild vine (Vitis silvestris) and the cultivated vine (Vitis vinifera) is suspected at the Cetamura site from as early as the third century b.c. As of 2014, approximately 430 grape seeds have been recovered from six strata (including Etruscan and Roman) in a 106-foot well there.11 These discoveries were made by an Italian firm specializing in the excavation of wells, in close collaboration with a team of archaeologists from Florida State University, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Syracuse University, and New York University under the direction of Nancy Thomson de Grummond, the overseer of the Cetamura del Chianti archaeological site since 1983. Many seeds were found in vessels that are believed to have been cast into the well as sacrificial offerings, along with coins, votive cups, animal knucklebones (astragali), and ceramic and stone tokens, as part of a sacred ritual involving divination at this high-elevation site at the eastern edge of Chianti. An Etruscan ceramic amphora, pottery from two of Chianti’s surrounding Etruscan cities, Volterra and Arezzo, and an Etruscan bronze wine bucket, along with a fragment of an Etruscan wine strainer, were also retrieved from this well. In light of the archaeological evidence for the ritual and artisanal activity that took place at this site during the Etruscan, Roman, and medieval periods, De Grummond and her team have christened it “the Sanctuary of the Etruscan Artisans at Cetamura del Chianti.” As this book went to print, the Cetamura grape seeds were undergoing DNA analysis to determine their varietal identification. There is much excitement in Chianti about whether Sangiovese or an early precursor of Chianti Classico’s principal vine variety will be found among the pips from Cetamura.
Given the routes that the Etruscans established throughout Chianti, it is an open question whether wine was being transported from there to the surrounding Etruscan towns. There is evidence that an Etruscan settlement at Pisa, at the mouth of the Arno River, served as a repository for agricultural produce (perhaps including wine) shipped down from the Arno River Valley.12 What is known is that, unlike the Greeks and their colonists in southern Italy and Sicily, who trained their vines either with the alberello (bush-vine) method or low on wooden stakes, the Etruscans “married” their vines to trees (usually elm, maple, or poplar).13 While the Etruscan words for “wine” and “vineyard,” vinum and vina, are Italic in origin, the Etruscan language included a distinct word, ataison, to identify this native form of vine training.14 From the Middle Ages until the mid-twentieth century, the sharecroppers of Chianti used a type of vine training called alberata or maritata, vines “married” with trees. Whether these peasant farmers knew it or not, their conjugal form of viticulture had deep roots in Chianti’s Etruscan soil.
Chianti remained a rural landscape for the Etruscan urban areas that encircled it. The pattern of modest Etruscan tombs in Chianti suggests that small family groups settled this countryside to intensively cultivate grapevines, olive and chestnut trees, and legumes as early as the second half of the seventh century b.c. Given the wooded hills and rocky soil, agriculture in this region must have been (and still is) a greater challenge than in the plains and valleys to the west of the Elsa River or on the gentle clay hills to the south of the Arbia River. The only evidence of ancient Chianti’s agriculture on display at the archaeological museum in Castellina are the fragments of bronze and iron implements that the Etruscan Chiantigiani used in their farming. The grape seeds that the archaeologists have excavated from the aqueous layers in the ritual well of Cetamura promise to help unlock some of the mysteries of Etruscan Chianti’s vinicultural past. Long before there were wine appellations of origin, there were the natural territorial borders established (and worshiped) by the Etruscans. The Etruscans used peaks, valleys, waterways, and trees to delimit both their urban and their pastoral landscapes. The Roman historian Varro credited the Etruscans with developing the science or discipline of defining the boundaries of land and sky, including the “cardinal points of north, south, east, and west.”15 Among their many deities, Selvans, depicted as a young man, was the protector of Etruria’s forests and wooded lands. He was also the god of their arboreal boundaries and borders.16 In the centuries to come, the winegrowers of the original Chianti would have done well to honor their ancient sylvan god!
Following the rise and fall of ancient Rome, Tuscany was invaded by tribes from north of the Alps, including the Ostrogoths and Longobards (Lombards). The former Etruria and its elevated wine culture lay buried deep in the rubble. The Etruscan cities of Fiesole and Chiusi were among the casualties. By 800, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, had liberated Italy from the Longobards and was crowned the Holy Roman emperor in Rome by the pope. A parade of Germanic and French kings followed Charlemagne, each vying for the imperial crown and hegemony on Italian soil. The ensuing conflicts between the empire and the papacy dominated the Tuscan landscape for centuries to come. Florence and Siena, along with dozens of other cities and townships (comuni, the plural of comune) in central and northern Italy, emerged as vibrant centers of commerce and capital (financial, political, and cultural). This process of urbanization (inurbamento) profoundly reshaped the relationship of Florence with its surrounding countryside (contado). Although each city had deeply personal (and violent) factions in support of both the papal and the imperial causes, Florence ultimately allied itself with the papacy under the Guelph banner (with the goal of securing greater political autonomy and the pope’s lucrative banking business), while Siena allied itself with the imperial aspirants under the Ghibelline banner. The feudal lords of Longobard stock (such as the Ricasoli-Firidolfi clan) with fortresses in Chianti generally also allied themselves with the Ghibelline cause. For their loyal service to the Germanic kings, these imperial legates were granted more territory and greater jurisdictional and fiscal prerogatives in their fiefs in Chianti. These feudal families fortified their castles and landholdings, including hilltop villages, in a process known as incastellamento. During the same age, Florence’s links with Chianti were strengthened as reform-minded religious orders such as the Vallombrosans built abbeys (badie, the plural of badia) in the countryside in search of solitude and agricultural revenue. By the end of the eleventh century, the Vallombrosan order had established both Badia a Passignano in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa and Badia a Coltibuono in Gaiole. To safeguard their commercial and agricultural supply routes, Florence and Siena sought greater control over their surrounding territory (ager in Latin). In each city’s march to become a city-state (civitas in Latin), conflict was inevitable. And Chianti became their battlefield.
Before engaging on the battlefield, Florence and Siena set out to subjugate the feudal families controlling their respective contadi (the plural of contado). This was the battle of commune versus castle. For Florence, that meant defeating the Ricasoli-Firidolfi clan, which possessed, by some accounts, as many as fifteen castles in Chianti, from Brolio Castle in Gaiole to Panzano Castle in the heart of the territory between Florence and Siena.17 In his sweeping history of Florence, the sixteenth-century author Scipione Ammirato described the Ricasoli family as the ancient “padrona d’una gran parte del Chianti” (lord of a large part of Chianti).18 One of the earliest pictorial representations of the region lies at the base of a Ricasoli family tree engraved in 1584 (reproduced on the back of this book’s dust jacket). Armored knights on horseback, with lances in hand, are shown riding into battle and hunting (two of Chianti’s longest-standing pastimes). The Arno River courses downstream east of the Chianti Mountains toward Florence,19 and the Massellone River flows through the center of Gaiole. Chapels and cypress-lined ridges punctuate the hilly landscape. The walled city of Siena lies in the background. It is a panorama of Ricasoli castles and fortified villages which also are among the storied estates and townships of modern Chianti Classico: Coltibuono, Montegrossolini (Montegrossi), M. Rinaldi (Monterinaldi), Brolio, Cacchiano, Meleto, Gaiole, S. Sano (San Sano), Selvole, Vertine, Ama, Rietine, Radda, and Panzano. According to a later Ricasoli genealogy, Chianti’s first family also owned castles in the upper Arno River Valley and the castle of Monteficalli (Montefioralle) in Greve.20 In telling the story of Florence’s conquest of Chianti, Ammirato identified Greve as the “villaggio al principio della provincia del Chianti” (village at the beginning of the province of Chianti).21 During the twelfth century, the Florentine Republic brought the Ricasoli-Firidolfis and the other feudal families of Chianti (and their vast landholdings) under its control. Brolio Castle (whose pentagonal bastions are unmistakable in the Ricasoli family tree) was the last Ricasoli citadel north of Siena’s territory. It fell to Florence in 1176. Florence finally asserted its dominion over Montegrossi Castle, the original bastion of the Firidolfis, in 1197.22 From that time forward, the Ricasoli-Firidolfi clan and its network of castles were perforce part of Florence’s defensive line against Siena.
By 1203, Florence was challenging Siena’s growing territorial influence. Siena had acquired control of the township of Montalcino to its south. The Florentines returned to the battlefield to extend their borders in Chianti while Siena was raiding the next important town to its south, Montepulciano. In the dispute over Chianti, the Florentines eventually prevailed at the bargaining table. The podestà (ruler) of Poggibonsi, together with an assemblage of bishops and leading laymen, awarded control of Chianti to the Florentines in an arbitral decision known as the Lodo di Poggibonsi (Poggibonsi Judgment) in June 1203. The Sienese flouted this decision for more than 350 years, until the Florentine Grand Duchy annexed their city-state in 1555. Every couple of decades or so, the citizen-soldiers and mercenaries of Siena (and its imperial allies) trampled the Chianti countryside, toppling castles and razing vineyards. (There were some difficult vintages in those centuries!) In response, the Florentines organized a network of military leagues (leghe, the plural of lega) to defend and govern their hard-won territories in all directions. The dimensions of each lega were based on the challenges which it was likely to confront in overseeing and defending its borders. The Lega del Chianti was born shortly before 1306.23 It united the three principal towns of Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole with almost seventy surrounding smaller villages and parishes. Radda served as its headquarters, and the gallo nero (black rooster), symbolizing vigilance, became its emblem. As of 1384 the Lega del Chianti extended from Staggia Castle on its western border (near Poggibonsi) to the parish churches in the Chianti Mountains on its eastern border (overlooking the upper Arno River Valley). Moving from the west, its northern boundary skirted south of the Pesa River and then farther south of the township of Greve and its several hamlets, including Panzano and Lamole, as Val di Greve had its own lega. The Florentine Republic appointed Piergiovanni Ricasoli as the commissario (commissioner) and podestà of both the Lega del Chianti and the Lega di Val di Greve during the Aragonese invasions of Chianti from 1478 through 1484.24 With this wartime commission, Florence effectively united Chianti and Val di Greve as one territory under the defensive command of the Ricasoli (and the standard of the gallo nero). Over time, the wine region of Chianti naturally evolved to incorporate the Greve River Valley as well. Piergiovanni Ricasoli and his fellow knights of the Lega del Chianti would not have been surprised.
In 1384 the Lega del Chianti adopted a formal set of bylaws (statuto) to govern itself. For the most part, their provisions covered the military and civil matters at the core of the lega’s mission. The lega added an article in 1444 called “Della vendemia” (About the harvest). It prohibited the harvesting of wine grapes within the lega’s borders before September 29 (the Feast of Saint Michael) each year.25 While recognizing the hardship that might compel certain families to harvest “their vineyards before the grapes were mature,” the language unequivocally prohibited this, given the “great damage which the lega would receive because the wines would not be good and could not be sold.”26 The provision also required that all dog owners keep their dogs tied up for the entire month of September. Violators were subject to monetary fines payable to the lega (with one-quarter of the fine going to the whistle-blower). A former podestà of the Lega del Chianti, Michelangelo Tanàglia, in the late fifteenth century authored a didactic poem titled De agricultura, in which he advised his readers
on the open hills, to never tire
of planting vines, of the best kind,
or of attending the plant of Bacchus,27
because wine grapes are the most profitable crop. The poem (written in the vernacular Tuscan language) also includes detailed descriptions of vine varieties and viticultural and enological recommendations. This lega took its Chianti seriously!
Between the early fourteenth century and the disbanding of the leghe by the Hapsburg-Lorraine grand duke in 1774, the borders of the Lega del Chianti changed slightly as townships and parishes were added or removed. After 1774 the townships of Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole were combined with the potesteria (territory) of Greve to create the vicariate of Radda. The grand duke himself, Peter Leopold, toured Chianti in July 1773 and kept a travel journal of his observations. He described “il Chianti” as encompassing the broad swath of land between Florence and Siena. According to the grand duke, Chianti was “tutta montagna” (all mountains), was bordered by “Florence, Certaldo and S. Casciano, as well as by Valdarno di Sopra and Siena,” and comprised “the vicariate of Radda and the potesteria of Greve.” He explained that “the most traveled road of Chianti” was the one “from Florence through Greve and Panzano to Castellina.”28 Remarkably, the map of the “vicariato di Radda” produced by Ferdinando Morozzi in 178129 looks like it could be a map of the first consortium of Chianti wine producers, established in 1924. For certain strident tradizionalisti (traditionalists) in the twentieth century, the historic borders of the medieval Lega del Chianti constituted the definitive boundaries of Chianti as a wine appellation. The story of Chianti as a wine region, however, did not begin or end with the Lega del Chianti.
In the long centuries that followed the decline of the Etruscan and Roman civilizations, the culture of the vine (vite) languished in the land of Etruria. As the cities in Tuscany grew into centers of trade, finance, and manufacturing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, agriculture was also commercialized and revitalized. In contrast with the rest of Europe, Tuscany’s rinascita (rebirth) began in the Middle Ages. This rebirth flourished in urban markets and rural fields. It was rooted in a culture of commerce and contracts—and poets and painters. The city of Florence established close links with its sources of grain, meat, produce, and wine. Urban citizens (cittadini), from noblemen to artisans, increasingly purchased land in the countryside with the goal of securing their food supply and investing their gold florins securely. Acquiring land in the contado promised greater economic self-sufficiency for city dwellers.30 It also conferred social capital once possessed only by the landed aristocracy. Within the walls of Florence and Siena, monastic and lay farmers tended walled gardens. Their vestiges are the extant communal streets and other places with vigna (vineyard) in the name. These urban vineyards (including those just outside or nearby the city walls) were likely either specialized or kitchen gardens with grapevines and olive and fruit trees planted together (vinea cum arboribus). Given the constraint of urban space, grapevines, whether trained low or on a pergola, would have been densely planted. In the early 1300s, ecclesiastical institutions and Florentine landholding families began widely planting specialized vineyards in the plains and hills surrounding the city.31 Beyond providing daily sustenance (as a companatico, or bread pairing), wine had assumed liturgical and medicinal importance in the Middle Ages. Before the bubonic plague epidemic (known as the Black Death) struck in 1348, the city of Florence had ninety thousand to one hundred thousand citizens by some counts, making it one of the five most populous in Europe. Its surrounding contado, including Chianti, was under great pressure to supply Florence with its most essential staple, grain. Prior to the Black Death, Florence needed to import the equivalent of seven months of its grain supply every year.32 The local market for wine was also robust. Florence’s guild of wine merchants (Arte dei Vinattieri) was first organized in 1266. The vinattieri worked with a network of agents (mediatori) throughout the countryside to purchase wine for the Florence market, even from peripheral areas of the contado such as Chianti.33 By one estimate, the consumption of wine in Florence totaled 23.7 million liters (6.3 million gallons) in 1280.34 Its annual per capita wine consumption ranged between 220 and 260 liters (58 and 69 gallons) during the 1300s.35 Each barrel of Chianti brought to market in Florence would have been subject to the duties (gabelle, the plural of gabella) imposed by the Florentine Republic on wine brought into the city and sold within its walls. The gabelle were also levied on other staples, including grain, meat, oil, and salt. By all accounts, the increasing gabelle (used to fund interest payments on the republic’s mounting public debt) did little to slake the Florentines’ thirst for wine.36
Jurists (civil and canon), notaries, and learned laymen who acquired land in the contado to plant their vines used their classical scholarship to recover the viticultural knowledge that was lost with the decline of Roman civilization. The rebirth of the classics so closely identified with the Florentine Renaissance of the 1400s and 1500s began centuries earlier with the recovery of Roman law by medieval counselors and clerics. Their knowledge of Latin provided a gateway to the discovery of ancient Roman texts, including the epic of Virgil, rhetoric of Cicero, and husbandry of Columella. The Tuscan poet and humanist Petrarch wrote works in Latin as well as Tuscan during the fourteenth century. He embraced the classical Roman ideology of agriculture as an ethical pursuit by personally tending to the grapevines, fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs in his gardens. In his library was a treasured personal codex of Virgil’s works. In 1339–40 he commissioned the Sienese master Simone Martini to paint a frontispiece for this volume. It is a tribute to Virgil’s three celebrated works, the Eclogues (also referred to as Bucolics), Georgics, and Aeneid. In the lower left-hand corner, symbolizing the Georgics, a lengthy poem exalting the virtues of agriculture, is a vinedresser at work. In contrast with the opening lines of the Georgics, which promise to explain how to “marry the vines to their arbor of elms,”37 Martini’s vinedresser is pruning a stand-alone, alberello-like vine. A distinct form of alberello tied to a stake is still found today in the high Chianti hills of Ruffoli, Casole, and Lamole overlooking Val di Greve and in Panzano. Compared with the maritata, or tree-festooned, vines of Virgil’s Georgics or the classic Tuscan countryside, Martini’s depiction of the freestanding vine in the Virgil frontispiece suggests a more careful form of viticulture, which the Sienese artist surely observed either in the Chianti hills and mountains north of his hometown or in Avignon, where he was working on commissions for the papal court (and on the Virgil frontispiece for Petrarch) during the 1330s.
The merchants of Florence also brought back empirical observations about French wine from their business travels north of the Alps. From the Middle Ages, Florentine and other Tuscan merchant-bankers were well represented at the Champagne fairs, and later those in Bruges and Lyon. At these fairs, Tuscany’s merchant-bankers were engaged in long-distance trade and finance in almost all commercial sectors, except those involving wine and other foodstuffs. One early Italian raconteur of France’s wine country was the Franciscan monk Salimbene. In his thirteenth-century Chronicle, he marveled that the hillsides and plains in Auxerre were covered everywhere with vineyards. He added that the farmers in this area of Burgundy “sow not, nor do they reap, neither have they storehouse nor barn; but they send wine to Paris by the river which flows hard by; and there they sell it at a noble price.”38 In other words, Salimbene (who had previously lived in Lucca, Siena, and Pisa in Tuscany) was amazed that the economy of Auxerre supported a monoculture of vines. Indeed, any Tuscan or Lombard merchant traveling to and from the Champagne fairs would have been equally astonished, given that no city in Tuscany or Lombardy (or elsewhere in continental Italy) lived on its agricultural trade “like the wine ports and cities of France, Rouen and La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Laon, Auxerre, [and] Beaune.”39
In the summer of 1348, following the bankruptcies of two of its most prominent banking houses (the Bardi and the Peruzzi) and devastating harvests in the previous two years, the bubonic plague felled approximately one-half of the population of Florence.40 The decades following this sudden population loss witnessed a dramatic reduction in the amount of grain that Florence required to provision its citizens. Remarkably, this also represented the beginning of Florence’s most vibrant economic growth, lasting until the end of the fifteenth century.41 Agriculture in the surrounding contado became more diversified (and by some measures more efficient) in the succeeding decades. In some areas, grapevines were planted on more than 30 percent of the cultivated land.42 More grapevines and olive and fig trees were also planted in areas of the countryside, like Chianti, “in ways more suitable to its nature.”43 In contrast with the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century, fewer specialized vineyards were planted in Florence’s surrounding countryside, in favor of an increasingly mixed system (coltivazione consociata) of tree-trained vines and other arboreal crops (which reduced a landlord’s capital expenditure by eliminating the need for wooden canes and specialized labor for dedicated vineyards). Because of the loss of manpower in the countryside following the Black Death (particularly in already sparsely populated areas like Chianti), absentee Florentine landowners consolidated their landholdings (in a process known as appoderamento) to create farms (poderi, the plural of podere) that could each be managed by a single family of tenant farmers.44 Unlike the winegrowers in Auxerre whom Salimbene observed, the farmers of Chianti were required to sow and reap their grain as well as tend and harvest their grapevines and olive trees. The Chiantigiani also lacked access to a navigable river on which to ship their wines to market “cheaply and without excessive jolting”45 (the Arno River was navigable only downstream from Florence to Pisa). The limited quantity of Chianti wine that reached Florence had to travel in barrels by mule- or ox-drawn carts over steep hills and through valleys. For wine being transported from Val di Greve (only about twenty-six kilometers, or sixteen miles, south of Florence), the cost of overland transport in this period is estimated to have added 25 percent to the price.46 Notwithstanding these challenges, Chianti wine made its name in the Florence market by the end of the fourteenth century, when the price of wine was increasing appreciably.47 The first known documentary reference to the wine of Chianti is an entry dated December 16, 1398, in a Florentine account book of the well-known Prato merchant Francesco di Marco Datini. It refers to his purchase, as arranged by his notary, Ser Lapo Mazzei (an ancestor of the Mazzei family of Castello di Fonterutoli in Castellina), of six barili of “vino biancho di Chianti” (“white wine of Chianti”; one barile, the singular of barili, was equal to forty-six liters, or twelve gallons, in the Florence of the early 1400s).48 In a letter of 1401, Mazzei also referred to “wine from Lamole in Val di Greve, which after some time will be good red wines.”49 While the earliest reference to Chianti wine is ironically to a white wine, Ser Lapo’s description of the red wine from Lamole could come from a modern wine writer’s description of a fine Chianti Classico.
In establishing a more equitable system to tax its residents (including the exaction of “interest-earning forced loans”50 to fund the public debt, called the Monte), the Florentine Republic in 1427 fortuitously developed a classification of the wines from its subborghi (suburbs), contado, and distretto (outer district). Called the Catasto (census), the new tax system required cittadini and contadini (the residents of the contado) alike to report the value of their taxable assets (based on the investment return on real estate and the fair market value of movables such as shares in the Monte). In taxing “liquid wealth,” the Catasto established reference values for agricultural products like wine. These were also used to calculate the yield harvested from agricultural landholdings. For our purposes, the 1427 Catasto could also be called the 1427 Classification. Without naming or ranking specific estates (like Bordeaux’s 1855 Classification), it established a tariff schedule for the wines of 106 growing regions or localities representing most of modern-day Tuscany (with the exception of Siena, Lucca, and Massa-Carrara).51 The “reputation enjoyed by the various production zones” determined these tariffs, although in certain cases the assigned reference values diverged from actual market prices.52 Among the highest valued were the wines from several localities in the upper Arno River Valley (such as Galatrona) and then those from “Chianti et tucta la provincia” (Chianti and its entire province), Panzano, Badia a Montemuro (a high-altitude hamlet north of Radda on the slopes of Monte San Michele), and “Valdirubbiana” (the Ema Creek Valley, near the modern-day hamlet of San Polo in the northeastern corner of the Chianti Classico appellation), followed by the wines of Lucolena and Mercatale a Greve.53 In other words, for the architects of the 1427 Catasto, the wines from Chianti and its entire province just north of Siena and farther northward to Panzano, the Chianti Mountains, the upper Greve River Valley, and the Ema Creek Valley were all worth their weight in florins!
While the 1427 Catasto did not define the geographic borders of “Chianti and its entire province,” an analysis of the numerous other place-names it listed indicates that in the early fifteenth century Chianti was still considered largely synonymous with the domain of the Lega del Chianti. Nevertheless, “and its entire province” suggests a more expansive view of Chianti as a wine region. As the Catasto’s tariff schedule indicates, the wines from the high valleys of the Arbia, Greve, and Pesa Rivers between Florence and Siena were all highly valued. So it is only natural that the intrinsic geographic and geologic conditions (steep hills with poor and rocky soils) that distinguished these locations came to be collectively associated with the prized territory that the Florentine Republic had wrested first from the feudal Ricasoli-Firidolfi family and then from the Republic of Siena a little more than 225 years earlier, namely Chianti.
In reviving the Latin agricultural treatises of classical authors such as Cato the Elder, Pliny the Elder, and Virgil, the Florentine humanists also restored the agrarian ideals of ancient Rome—in both letter and spirit. As Rome had evolved from a republic to an empire, its leaders had embraced “agricultural tranquillity and the pursuit of the golden mean, ‘aurea mediocritas.’”54 Following Florence’s evolution from a republic to a principate, its ruling families likewise embraced agricultural tranquillity. In the first half of the fifteenth century, Cosimo de’ Medici immersed himself in both the library and the garden at his country villa outside Florence.55 By the late 1400s, Lorenzo de’ Medici (instead of pruning vines or grafting fruit trees like his grandfather Cosimo) was writing works that “expressed his delight in the beauty of the Tuscan countryside and in the many pleasures it offered.”56 Beyond finding peace in their country gardens, the landowning families and ecclesiastical orders of Florence institutionalized agricultural stability in the form of the mezzadria (sharecropping) system. Florentines brought their knowledge of legal contracts and financial accounting to the management of their agricultural landholdings. They entered into leases with tenant farmers on either a fixed-term or a perpetual basis, stipulating fixed rent (monetary or in kind) or share (in kind only) payments, to cultivate previously abandoned or wooded lands. In the mid-thirteenth century, the mezzadria form of tenancy was introduced in the countryside of both Florence and Siena. Chianti was no exception. Radda, Greve, and Castellina are the places in Chianti where the earliest mezzadria contracts have been identified, from the Duecento (1200s).57 The Florentine landlords increasingly entered into fixed-term leases with their sharecropper farmers (mezzadri, the plural of mezzadro) to cultivate Chianti’s rocky terrain and lean soil. These contracts provided that the padrone (landowner or landlord) and the mezzadro would share the year’s harvest equally (mezzadria deriving from mezzo, or “half”). As a general rule, the landlord would deduct from the mezzadro’s share an amount equal to one-half of the working capital that the landlord had advanced (without interest) earlier in the agricultural cycle for oxen, manure, seeds, wooden stakes, or tools. The landlord also invested capital to construct or enlarge the farmhouse, or casa colonica, for each resident mezzadro family’s podere. This was typically a stone building that included (in addition to the farmworkers’ living quarters) a cistern, stall, oven, and wine cellar. The sharecropper tenancy, with its built-in incentives for efficient and productive land use by the mezzadro family, required less labor supervision and land management by the absentee landowner.58 Contrary to the popular association between the mezzadria form of tenancy and mixed agriculture, during the Middle Ages the mezzadria contract initially provided for the intensive planting and tending of specialized vineyards, stipulating that the vines be trained on dry stakes and densely planted in tight rows.59 Their provisions detailed the requirements for systemizing old vineyards and planting new ones (often reserving the direct care, conduzione diretta, of the vineyard for the landowner and his salaried workers).60 The cultivation of tree crops and grain was contemplated for plots of land distinct from the vineyard. By the Renaissance, the culture of dedicated vineyards in many places had ceded ground to a different type of intensive agriculture, a polyculture called coltura promiscua (a form of intercropping with rows of vine-supporting trees alternating with rows of grain, olive trees, fruit trees—including mulberry, for silk—and herbaceous plants such as legumes). Given the mezzadro family’s requirement for self-sufficiency, this provided for almost all of its (and its animals’) sustenance. The diversity of crops grown by sharecroppers also provided for the self-sufficiency of the landlord’s family, by ensuring a balanced source of agricultural products and revenue. With the exception of select areas in Chianti (including the terraced vineyards in the high hills of Lamole and other high-elevation sites in the upper Pesa, Greve, and Arno River Valleys) and the personal vineyard gardens of estate owners (vigna padronale), dense rows of low-trained vines on stakes—and careful viticulture—largely disappeared from the landscape of central Tuscany until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
While its story is not homogeneous throughout Tuscany, the mezzadria system over time became a hardened institution that ruled the region’s countryside for more than six centuries. As Florentines purchased more land for investment, they consolidated their landholdings in the contado as larger estates.61 Initially, sharecropper leases had five- or three-year fixed terms, subject to renewal by the landlord. Then the mezzadria contract (with the help of countless lawyers and notaries) became a boilerplate one-year renewable contract with patti aggiuntivi (additional terms) requiring that the tenant farmer and his family provide supplemental services and agricultural products (e.g., digging a specified distance of trenches for grapevine and olive tree plantings, transporting the landlord’s produce from the fields or to market, or “gifting” capons, eggs, or itemized produce from their kitchen garden) as further consideration for the lease of the podere (including occupancy of the casa colonica). The working capital advanced by landowners also substantially indebted mezzadri families, far outweighing their credits at year-end. (The double-entry accounting system that the Florentine merchant-bankers had perfected in the Middle Ages also proved useful in the countryside.) Meanwhile, unlike his artisan counterpart in Florence, the mezzadro was not educated or literate, making the mezzadria lease a contract of adhesion (i.e., take it or leave it) rather than a bilateral expression of mutual obligations and rights. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, isolated poderi were consolidated into estates (fattorie, the plural of fattoria). The Florentine landowner (or an intermediate fixed-rent tenant) hired a resident overseer (fattore) to manage the estate, its multiple poderi, and the resident mezzadri families. By all accounts, the fattore ruled with an iron fist on behalf of his padrone. Ultimately, the mezzadria tenancy provided the sharecropper family with the opportunity for mere subsistence rather than self-sufficiency. And although the fattore improved the administration of the estate and the transformation of its grapes to marketable wine, the mezzadria system effectively diminished the possibility of agricultural innovation. Many modern Chianti Classico producers have preserved the detailed accounting ledgers that each fattore kept (with meticulously scripted pages of credits and debits) and the watercolor cadastral maps (cabrei, the plural of cabreo) of the fattorie, commissioned by the estate owners, as testaments of this enduring institution, now called the mezzadria classica toscana.
Given the importance that Florentines placed on contracts in all of their business and personal dealings, why did Florentine landowners not use their bargaining power to amend their mezzadria contracts to require the planting and tending of dedicated vineyards in order to produce higher-quality wine at any point prior to the mid-twentieth century? When, by the early seventeenth century, Florence had lost its dominance as a center of commerce and finance, Florentines understood that their primary wealth was grounded in agriculture—and that their secondary wealth flowed from its fruits (most importantly, wine). While erudite Florentines wrote dozens of learned agricultural treatises during these centuries, why did the Florentine landowner not return to the land “as a gentleman-farmer” to cultivate his estate directly (as occurred in France in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries)?62 When the esteemed English agriculturalist Arthur Young toured a natural history exhibit in a Florentine museum in the late eighteenth century, he was astonished that there was “no chamber for agriculture; no collection of machines, relative to that first of arts.”63 While Florentines recognized and debated the shortcomings of the mezzadria system and coltura promiscua for viticulture (and agricultural advancement in general) beginning in the mid-1700s, the landowners of Tuscany (and eventually Chianti) deeply believed that they had devised and perfected a system which represented the ideal balance between capital and labor in their countryside (especially when compared with the impoverished rural areas of southern Italy and Sicily). Their steadfast allegiance to this system had deep cultural roots.
In the fourteenth century, Petrarch’s embrace of ancient Roman texts extolling the virtues of farming and country life had masked an underlying belief that agriculture was inferior to “the liberal and respected arts.”64 While throughout most of his life he “played the farmer”65 in his own gardens, he also revealed the latent ambivalence that Florentines (and indeed their Roman ancestors) harbored toward the ancient and practical (i.e., mechanical) art of agriculture. In the age of humanism, the poets and merchant-bankers of the Florentine Renaissance expressed respect for painters such as Simone Martini and their scientia et doctrina (knowledge and learning), the exact qualities that set the liberal arts apart from the mechanical ones (such as agriculture).66 The painter, sculptor, or builder in Renaissance Florence was an artist, not just a craftsman. The farmer or winegrower enjoyed no such honor. He remained a rustico (rustic) from the campagna (countryside). In seeking to understand the fundamental distinction between the culture of wine in Burgundy and that in Tuscany beginning in the proto-Renaissance, we can find no clearer voice than that of Petrarch. Throughout his life Petrarch penned letters to the political and thought leaders of his day. Between 1366 and 1368 he wrote to Pope Urban V about the imperative to move the seat of the papacy from Avignon back to the Eternal City, Rome. In this urgent appeal, Petrarch refuted one of the objections that the papal court proffered to any such return:
Against my will I now speak at length about a lowly subject, foreign to my tastes, but the matter at hand forces me. I know what people are like. I have often heard them say that Italy does not have the wine of Burgundy. What a grievous scandal and a just reason for abandoning Italy! But does this not seem a childish boast to brag about a few jugs of common wine that some hill or other located on the transalpine side produces, and then to scorn so many different kinds of fine wines with which all of Italy overflows?67
While the lack of Burgundian wine in the papal wine cellar in Rome would hardly seem a legitimate reason for keeping the papacy in Avignon, Petrarch’s observation regarding the “childish boast” by Burgundians about a “common wine that some hill or other located on the transalpine side produces” reflected a fundamental devaluation of the art of agriculture and the French concept of terroir (territorialità in Italian). With all of the exalted cultural achievements that came to define the Florentine Renaissance, viticulture largely remained, in Petrarch’s words, “a lowly subject” and produced vastly more than “a few jugs of common wine” in Tuscany. The mezzadria system that Florentine landowners institutionalized in much of their countryside, while preserving agricultural tranquillity and economic security for centuries, proved more mediocris (mediocre) than aurea (golden) for the culture of wine in Tuscany.
For the Florentine Republic, Chianti represented a remote frontier to defend and control. For the Sienese Republic, Chianti was the countryside of verdant hills rolling out just beyond its northern walls. After the medieval border was drawn between Florentine Chianti (Chianti Fiorentino) and Sienese Chianti (Chianti Senese), all that remained of Chianti for Siena was the butterfly-shaped area of present-day Castelnuovo Berardenga. This border also symbolized a cultural divide between the landowners of Chianti Fiorentino and those of Chianti Senese.
Siena’s political and cultural influence culminated in the first half of the fourteenth century. The Republic of Siena embarked on an ambitious series of civil works projects in the late thirteenth century. By 1310 it had completed its new town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, on the fan-shaped Piazza del Campo. In 1337, the year before construction of the palazzo’s bell tower commenced, Siena’s governing Council of the Nine commissioned the Sienese artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti to paint a cycle of three frescoes inside its meeting room (Sala dei Nove), on the second floor of the Palazzo Pubblico. On the east wall, Lorenzetti painted an idealized vision of Siena as a city-republic governed by the virtues of Wisdom and Justice in fealty to the Common Good. These virtues (along with several other civic and theological virtues) and the Bene Comune (Common Good) are personified on the adjoining north wall in a fresco that has been labeled The Allegory (or Virtues) of Good Government. Yet for all of its complexity and symbolism, it is not the fresco on the north wall but that of the east wall (commonly referred to as The Effects of Good Government or Buon governo) that beckons and captivates the viewer. It is an urban and rural landscape rich with naturalistic detail and devoid of religious imagery. The left-hand side has Lorenzetti’s depiction of Siena as a vibrant city, where commerce and culture thrive. Peasants enter from the country, alongside their mules carrying bales of raw wool and wood to the arcade of workshops lining the main piazza. Next to the first bottega, where wine from a barrel is sold, stands a hall where a scholar lectures his attentive students. In the foreground, nine maidens clasp hands and dance in two intersecting circles to the music of the tenth maiden, who plays the tambourine. A wedding procession on horseback rides to the Duomo (whose greenish-black-and-white-striped bell tower rises in the background) while workers atop a scaffolded edifice in the middle ground build the city before the viewer’s eyes. The right-hand side of the east wall has Lorenzetti’s depiction of Siena’s countryside, where agriculture and culture flourish. The center point of the fresco is the red-brick city wall and tall gate, meant to divide but here uniting the comune and its contado. Projecting from the top of the gate is a sculpted she-wolf with two suckling infants, Senius (the son of Remus, one of ancient Rome’s founding twins) and Aschius, the mythological founders of Siena. For this reason, the gate is believed to be Siena’s southern gate, called the Porta Romana. A parade of farmers, hunters, and pilgrims (and their animals) travels the road leading to and from it, moving freely between town and country. The vigna in the foreground hugging the city wall at the top of the hill is densely planted. Two olive trees are in the back corner where the wall meets the edge of the city gate. The alberello vines are staked to low single vertical canes (canne). Four hunters with crossbows and one standing guard are stalking the vineyard for the birds that have nestled among the thicket of shoots and leaves to feed on the ripe grapes. On the other side of the road is another vineyard, planted in tight parallel rows down the hillside (girapoggio, or crosswise to the slope, to avoid erosion from rainwater runoff). From the viewer’s vantage, the scene encompasses the countryside surrounding Siena from the green Chianti hills (to the north) to the grayish-tan clayey hills (to the south) known as the Crete Senesi (Sienese clays).
The Chianti hills as Lorenzetti has illustrated them are covered by a patchwork of low-staked vineyards bordered by trees and fields bounded by hedges. In the mustard-colored plains below, grain is both sown and harvested, to signify the complete agricultural cycle. In the distance there are farmhouses, villas, and castles. The villa with two crenellated towers to the northeast of Porta Romana has an arbor covered with leafy vines. This was a medieval estate of Chianti Senese. The river to the east of the city is likely the Arbia, flowing from its source in Chianti, north of the town of Castellina. Lorenzetti, the painter-philosopher of Siena, has left the world with a vivid (albeit idealized) image of the countryside surrounding Siena, including the Chianti hills at its northern doorstep. There can be no mistaking that before the mezzadria system became deeply rooted in the Florentine and Sienese countryside, there were specialized vineyards in Chianti. Lorenzetti’s depiction of Siena’s Buon Governo places agriculture on a level plane with commerce.
Indeed, the merchant-bankers of Siena embraced agriculture following the collapse of their banking empires at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.68 This early return to the land by leading Sienese families created a class of “rural gentry” that ruled Siena. As Siena’s tax records show, from 1316 through 1320 only three of the 120 merchant-bankers who served on the Council of the Nine did not own any land outside the city.69 In this same period, “the value of rural holdings was found to exceed the value of urban property” at every economic level in Siena (including among its painters).70 By contrast, at the time of the Florentine 1427 Catasto, the wealth of the top 1 percent of Florence’s wealthiest families was invested more in movable assets, such as public debt instruments, than in real estate.71 Siena’s ruling class, having embraced the land as the source of its wealth during the period of the Buon Governo, influenced the institutions and values of Siena to promote agriculture (albeit within the context of the mezzadria system). This may help to explain why prominent Sienese landholders in Chianti Senese, like the Del Taia, Bianchi Bandinelli, and Bindi Sergardi families, were actively managing their estates and exporting their Chianti wine by the early 1700s (in advance of many Florentine landowners with equally sizable properties in Chianti).
Eight years after he completed the cycle of three frescoes in the Sala dei Nove, Lorenzetti, his wife, and three of their daughters (and his older brother, the accomplished artist Pietro Lorenzetti) all perished during the Black Death in 1348. His Buon governo, though, has survived, preserving a panorama of the Sienese Republic’s civic and agricultural ideals—and an exceptional view of Chianti Senese.
Approximately forty-eight kilometers (thirty miles) north of Siena, Florence’s town hall, the Palazzo Vecchio, looms over the Piazza della Signoria. On its second floor, in a grand reception hall (Sala Grande), is a cycle of paintings that Florence’s second Medici duke, Cosimo I, commissioned to commemorate Florence’s conquest of the Republic of Siena in 1555 (and the marriage of his son Francesco to Austrian royalty in 1565). This hall is also named the Salone dei Cinquecento, in honor of the five-hundred-member Grand Council that had ruled the Florentine Republic in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, preceding the installation of Alessandro de’ Medici as Florence’s first duke by Europe’s papal and imperial powers in 1530. Two centuries after Lorenzetti depicted the Republic of Siena as the Buon Governo, Florence had become a hereditary principality. The artist Giorgio Vasari was charged with decorating the walls and ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento to glorify Cosimo I and his rule over the Duchy of Tuscany (which became a Grand Duchy in 1569). In each of the corners of the eighteen-meter (fifty-nine-foot) high ceiling there is a cluster of four coffered square panels depicting four ancient territories of the Duchy of Florence. Each cluster is geographically linked to one of the four administrative quadrants of the city of Florence.72 In the southwest corner of the room (aligned with Florence’s Santo Spirito quarter) is the cluster of four panels depicting the territories of Certaldo, Volterra, Colle Val d’Elsa with San Gimignano, and “Ager Clantius Et Eius Oppida” (the territory of Chianti and its towns). The year 1197 is inscribed in Roman numerals and heralded as the “Anno Salutis” (Year of salvation) on the gold frame of the Ager Clantius painting, signifying when the Florentines finally asserted their dominion over the Ricasoli-Firidolfi clan and hence Chianti.
Vasari and his workshop of artists created perhaps the first visual image of Florentine Chianti. Given the vantage point of Cosimo I (depicted in the regalia of an ancient Roman emperor and seated on a throne in the ceiling’s central medallion) looking out over the domains of his duchy, it is a view of Chianti from the perspective of the city of Florence. The image is both an allegorical and a geographic representation of the region. Consistent with all of the imagery in the cycle of frescoes and other paintings in the room, it is a manneristic (as opposed to naturalistic) vision of Chianti, replete with triumphal classical symbols and decorative elements. Vasari, who was also an architect and author, wrote a manuscript explaining his cycle of paintings in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Vecchio, structured as a fictional dialogue between him and Prince Francesco de’ Medici, the son of his patron. Vasari briefly described how he had depicted Chianti with two rivers, the Pesa and the Elsa. While his identification of the Elsa River, which runs well to the west of Chianti, as one of its traditional borders may be questionable from a geographic perspective, his depiction of the two principal tributaries flowing north into the Arno is consistent with the spatial perspective of the Florentine viewer.73 Vasari represents each river flowing from an urn poised on either side of a mature Bacchus, the dominant figure in the foreground of the painting. The artist explained that he had chosen a Bacchus “of a more mature age for the excellent wines of that region.”74 His Bacchus is gray bearded but as chiseled as Michelangelo’s David. But this Bacchus looks as if he has consumed far too much Chianti! He sits barely upright, flushed and overcome by slumber. He leans heavily against the clutter of urns, cornucopia, and other figurative props in the middle ground of the scene. Rather than Bacchus, it is the youthful soldier standing behind and to the left of him who brings vitality to the image. He wears a billowing red cape, which is strapped to his shoulders in the manner of a Roman knight. Wearing a crown of vine wood adorned with grape bunches and leaves, he lifts a drinking bowl (shaped like an ancient Greek kylix) in his left hand and grips his carved oval shield with his right hand. This shield bears a tall black rooster set against a golden field, the emblem of the Lega del Chianti. Vasari confirmed that it is this “young man who represents Chianti.”75
In the background, set against rolling forest-green hills, are the oppida (towns) of Chianti. In his fictional dialogue, Vasari explained that “in the distance I have painted Castellina, Radda, and Brolio with their insignia.”76 He is reported to have sent his assistants to the field to draw each town’s architectural landmarks from life.77 The massive castle in the background on the left with its stepped towers and crenellated rectilinear walls strongly resembles Brolio Castle, the very symbol of Chianti and its founding feudal clan, the Ricasoli-Firidolfis.78 The town in the distant background in the middle is barely visible but could only be Radda, given its central location between Brolio and Castellina. The town perched on the hill in the background on the right is unmistakably Castellina, with its curved northern wall. The architectural clues combine with geography to identify the towns: viewing Chianti from the vantage point of Florence (i.e., looking south) means that Brolio Castle in Gaiole is on the left (to the east) and Castellina on the right (to the west). By representing Brolio Castle (instead of the town of Gaiole), Vasari portrayed Chianti not just as the three towns of Gaiole, Radda, and Castellina but as the entire territory historically under the dominion of the Ricasoli-Firidolfi clan that Florence had come to control by the end of the twelfth century. In contrast to Lorenzetti’s idealized agrarian vision of Chianti Senese from 225 years earlier, Vasari’s depiction of Chianti Fiorentino lacks any signs of agriculture. Instead, he displayed its abundant fruits and animal trophies in the foreground of his painting like the ancient booty of war and the bounty of “divine favor.”79 Vasari gave his patron, Cosimo I, an expansive and triumphant vision of Chianti—and a room with a view fit for a duke.
In the end, the story of Chianti is not one of physical plunder or ruin. While it served as a battlefield between Florence and Siena (and their shifting papal and imperial allies) on and off from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, it also survived as a place of pristine beauty. Any modern-day pilgrim traveling through Chianti bears witness to this enduring beauty. Undeniably, the stability of the mezzadria system for centuries and the wisdom of the Florentines and Sienese who safeguarded their countryside after the dissolution of the sharecropping system in the mid-twentieth century are responsible, in their own ways, for saving Chianti as a landscape. Nonetheless, the story of Chianti involves the plunder of a cherished intangible—the region’s very identity and reputation. The toponym Chianti, though mysterious in origin, connoted quality in wine long before Sangiovese was identified as its principal variety. Winegrowers in the high hills between Florence and Siena have produced wine known as Chianti since at least the fourteenth century. It was the rocky soils, faceted expositions, and cooler climate of their land, the elements of nature that distinguished the precious wine of the original Chianti. Long before technical advances in viticulture and enology (and the reputation of consulting enologists) conferred prestige on this appellation, it was the elemental beauty of Chianti and its wine that was appreciated, both near and far. As a wine region, Chianti evolved beyond its medieval military borders. The high-elevation sites of both the upper Greve River Valley and upper Pesa River Valley (and their liminal growing areas) have much in common with the traditional sites of Gaiole, Radda, and Castellina. Any student of Chianti and its wine will find historical references to place-names like Panzano, Lamole, Casole, Ruffoli, Lucolena, and Montescalari and estate names like Vignamaggio (in Greve), Monte Bernardi (in Panzano), and Arceno and San Felice (in Castelnuovo Berardenga). This evolution of Chianti as a wine region was natural. With time, the merchant-bankers of Florence and Tuscany understood the commercial value of the mythic name Chianti. And so began the use by wine merchants of the brand Chianti across Tuscany and eventually Italy and beyond (and with it, the loss of more than one hundred distinctive place-names of Tuscan wine origin established by the 1427 Classification). This devolution of Chianti as a wine region was man-made. The story of the original Chianti is complex. It cannot be truthfully told without laying its complexity bare. Ultimately, it is a story of the confrontation of culture and commerce. But at its heart, it is the story of a natural beauty that has long deserved to be known by its own name: Chianti.