This story begins a few centuries ago, when generations of men and women began to build this home with stones from the outcropping rocks. La Fontaccia, an old farm owned by Elisabetta’s family for over a century, was a farmhouse that housed the numerous peasant families and rural buildings such as the old stone barn that hosted the animals. The house was surrounded by a large, sunny, terraced land with high dry-stone walls built with the hard work of those who cultivated this land in the past. In here, life used to be simple, often unjust, but respectable, and characterized by the communion between human beings and nature, with its times and its seasons. Country life in this region has remained virtually unchanged for centuries, a tradition of hard work, of made up recipes realized using what nature and work would bring to the kitchen
Since more than a century
Our house hosts people
From abandonment
To a new life
The farm appears for the first time in the Florentine Catasto of 1427, when its toponym was “La Fonte”. Only between 1832 and 1835 its name evolved into “Fontaccia”, and finally “La Fontaccia”. Life in the farm gradually evolved year after year and in 1923 it reached its current form. The second world war forced its way in all of the houses and in all of the farms, laying the foundations for an epochal change. The reconstruction will bring come along with industrial progress and a new idea of welfare and social equaliy that will lead to the end of sharecropping. La Fontaccia farm, after years of progressive and slow abandonment, is definitively abandoned in the 80s. In the same decade we, Elisabetta and Samuele, were born in the city of Florence.
WE ARE ELISABETTA AND SAMUELE
and we will welcome you to our farmhouse
We both were born and raised in a city context, with urban habits and customs and we both enrolled in University: Economics was Elisabetta’s choice and Architecture was Samuele’s. This is when we met and fell in love. Living in Florence, in families that have kept the tradition alive through recipes and regional dishes, means always having the countryside in the back of your mind. In some ways the rural world has always been present in the history of this city, and even today many Florentine families have a house in the countryside, relatives who live there, or are descendants of those who worked on farms. We discover La Fontaccia escaping from city stress, finding refuge in the only accessible part of the farm. Some party with friends and the peace of nature convinced us that this place may be something more than a problematic and falling family property. The charm of the ruin invaded by ivy and wild nature where once was a vibring and living farm leaves in our minds room for displeasure and nostalgia. Here the idea of making this place useful, productive, ordered and dignified again. The whole family is involved and with the help of the European Community we start the renovation works trying to respect the original structure, shapes and materials, and using new technologies able to reduce the environmental impact. We reclaim the uncultivated land and plant the new olive trees when we reopen the farm. After years of work, in 2014 we were ready to welcome the first guests. La fontaccia Came back to life.
