1,400 Years of History
Written in These Walls

The First People on These Hills

Long before anyone built the first stone wall here, the hillsides immediately around Podere Spedalone were already inhabited. Archaeological surveys of the adjacent fields uncovered concentrations of Etruscan and Hellenistic ceramics, roof tiles and squared structural stones dating to the 3rd–2nd century BC — including a black-varnish pottery fragment with two letters carved into it after firing. The settlement appears to have shifted progressively to higher ground over the centuries, a pattern that ends at the medieval farmstead that still stands today.

Founded in the Time of the Romans and Lombards

A sentence issued in 722 AD by the Church curia in favour of the Bishop of Arezzo states that the churches and hospitals of this territory were "a tempore Romanorum et Longobardorum, ex quo a fundamentis conditae sunt" — founded in the time of the Romans and Lombards. The hospital that would become Spedalone belongs precisely to this moment. A Lombard presbyter named Aufrit is separately documented writing of Cosona: "In Cosona I served and here I came daily to celebrate, because this sacred place has been since the most ancient times subject to the church of S. Maria di Cosona."

It was also the Lombards who built the Via Francigena itself — the great pilgrimage road — on the traces of a Roman consular route, after the older Via Cassia through the Val di Chiana became silted and dangerous. This road would define everything that followed at Spedalone for the next eight centuries.

The Crossroads — Why a Hospital Was Built Exactly Here

There is a precise reason the Hospitalis Sancti Benedicti was established on this particular hillside and not somewhere else: Spedalone stood at the confluence of two important ancient road systems, both of Roman origin. The historian Alfredo Maroni, working from a 17th-century topographic map by Matteo Seutter and confirmed by the provincial archaeological survey, identified the two routes:

This same road also served as the main transhumance corridor connecting Pratomagno to the Maremma — herds passed through here until well into the 20th century.

Campus Arenae — The Earliest Known Owner of This Land

In March 775, a diplomatic codex records cultivated fields, vines and farmhouses belonging to the Benedictine Badia di San Salvatore sull'Amiata in this area — the territory that would become Camprena and Spedalone. The geographer Repetti records it as Campus Arenae (the sandy fields), from which the name Camprena derives. This Benedictine claim almost certainly explains how the later hospital came to be dedicated to San Benedetto. In 1228, a papal inspection ordered by Gregory IX found such scandalous laxity at the Badia that the Benedictines were replaced by Cistercians — and the lands and their dependent institutions began their slow passage toward the Olivetani monks.

The Oldest Stone — A Lookout Tower Above the Valley

The oldest surviving part of the farmhouse you see today dates to approximately 600–700 AD. During restoration works, Roman glass and brick fragments were found in the excavations beneath it. It was almost certainly a lookout tower — built to command the valley below and monitor the two road systems converging at its feet. If you stand on the south terrace at sunset and watch the light cross the Val d'Orcia, you understand immediately why someone chose this exact spot.

Charlemagne's Army — and the Herbs That Saved Them

The north wing of the farmhouse dates architecturally to the Carolingian era. In 813 AD, returning to France from his papal coronation in Rome, Charlemagne camped with his army near Castelnuovo dell'Abate. His men fell ill. According to tradition, a vision revealed to him a healing infusion made from the wild herbs growing on this hillside. His men recovered. In gratitude, Charlemagne ordered the construction of the Abbey of Sant'Antimo — still standing a few kilometres away, still visited, still singing Gregorian chant on quiet mornings. The particular herb said to have saved the army is still called Carolina in this region to this day.

Historians note that the Charlemagne foundation story is traditional rather than documented — the earliest reliable record of the abbey is a land grant of Louis the Pious dated December 813, preserved in the Archivio di Stato of Siena. By its medieval peak, the abbey had authority over 38 churches from Pisa to Grosseto and controlled roughly 1,000 farm estates across Tuscany. In 1462, Pope Pius II — whose family owned lands directly in this area — suppressed the abbey and attached it to the new diocese of Montalcino-Pienza. And the story comes full circle: since January 2016, Sant'Antimo has been home once again to Olivetan Benedictine monks — the very order who planted Spedalone's olive grove six centuries ago.

The same herb species — rosemary, wild thyme, sage, fennel, chamomile and others — still grow freely on Spedalone's old stone walls today, exactly as they did in 813.

The Archbishop Who Documented Our Road

In 990 AD, Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury walked to Rome to receive his pallium from Pope John XV, then recorded every overnight stop on his return journey — 80 stages, 1,700 kilometres, on two pages of a diary now preserved in the British Library. His notes are the founding document of the Via Francigena. Without them, we would not know the route that made Spedalone's hospital strategically essential. The road Sigeric documented passed through the Val d'Orcia, through this valley. The Council of Europe formally recognised the Via Francigena as a Great European Cultural Route in 1994. Today around 50,000 pilgrims walk some part of Sigeric's route every year — many passing within sight of Spedalone's hill.

Spedalone and the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala

The Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena — founded in 898, documented from 1090, a functioning hospital for nearly a millennium — built a network of fortified agricultural estates across the Sienese territory to fund its charitable work: the grance. These were fortified complexes with granaries, wine cellars, olive presses and defensive walls, positioned along or near the Via Francigena. The principal grance — Cuna, Serre di Rapolano, Montisi, San Quirico and Spedaletto — were formed in the late 1200s and early 1300s.

The Castello di Spedaletto — literally the "little hospital" — passed to Santa Maria della Scala in 1236 and was converted into a grancia. It is the same Spedaletto listed alongside Spedalone in the Vatican's 1295–1304 papal tax registers (Rationes Decimarum Italiae): two nodes in the same road-side charity network stretching from Siena to the Maremma. Spedalone — the "big hospital" — operated within this gravitational field: same pilgrim traffic, same agricultural model, same Sienese institutional world.

There is one more piece of evidence — physical, not documentary. The floors of Spedalone are laid with triangular terracotta cotto tiles in a distinctive pattern that matches the paving found in Santa Maria della Scala itself. The same tile, the same geometry, the same hand. Someone built both. It is the kind of detail that passes quietly through the centuries until someone thinks to look down.

Hospitalis Sancti Benedicti — Welcome, Pilgrim

The first documentary record of the site dates to 1227: it is registered as the Hospitalis Sancti Benedicti — the Hospital of Saint Benedict — in the parish of Santa Maria di Cosona. By this point the building had become a fortified structure with high defensive walls, many of which lie buried beneath today's gardens. The same 1227 document also records a wooded area called Spissa (La Spessa) as hospital property — the woodland that pilgrims would pass through on their approach.

The three great medieval pilgrimages — to Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela — converged in this part of Tuscany. Pilgrims rested at Spedalone on their journey. The Estimo catastale di Trequanda (1295) and the Vatican's papal taxation registers (Rationes Decimarum Italiae, 1295–1304) both list the hospital alongside other contemporary institutions in the Val d'Orcia: Spedaletto, Hospitalis Alamannorum and Hospitalis Sancti Iohannis de Monticchiello — an entire network of roadside sanctuaries serving the Via Francigena.

The name Spedalone itself is an augmentative — it distinguished this larger, more important establishment from a smaller nearby facility, the hospitalis Ser Torelli (colloquially "lo spedalino"), which also operated in the area but closed and disappeared long ago.

The Cistern — Still Here, Buried in the Woodland

Approximately 100 metres from the farmhouse, along the path into the wood towards the Salvadominici farm, there is a medieval stone cistern that most visitors never find. Circular, roughly 3 metres in diameter, with a beautiful arched stone opening facing the road and regular dressed-stone masonry, it was built to supply water to the hospital above. It is still standing. Listed by archaeologists as one of the most significant medieval surface structures in the entire province of Pienza.

The provincial archaeological survey (Carta Archeologica della Provincia di Siena, 2004) describes it precisely: an arched stone opening with a flat stone threshold, surrounded by regular dressed-stone masonry, with the interior still partially visible though filled with earth. Its chronology was established by placing it in relation to the documented phases of the adjacent hospital — it belongs to the same medieval building period. Site 174.1.

The Road Moves — and the Hospital Falls Silent

Sometime in the early Trecento, the Sienese Republic rerouted the Via Francigena. The new road — documented in 1302 as a "strata nova" running across the plain of the Tuoma towards Corsignano (later Pienza) — bypassed the ancient route on which the Hospital of San Benedetto had stood. The historic stone bridge over the Tuoma (the Pontaccio, still partially visible today) was abandoned. The old road through Spedalone was demoted to an emergency bypass, used only when the Asso and Tuoma rivers flooded, or when soldiers were on the move.

The Tuoma plain the new road crossed is where the Palazzone di Tuoma still stands — a historic manor documented since medieval times and today formally protected as Bene Sparso Agricolo n.16 in the Pienza Piano Strutturale. This was the agricultural and road landscape that replaced Spedalone's pilgrimage function: the new axis that drew life away from the hospital and toward what would become Pienza.

Without the constant flow of pilgrims and travellers, the hospital lost its purpose. The Pieve di Santa Maria di Cosona — whose image, a three-nave church with cylindrical bell tower, is preserved in a seal at the Siena archives — declined in the same period. The absorption of Spedalone into the Olivetani monastery at Sant'Anna in Camprena became historically inevitable.

Saint Catherine of Siena Comes to These Hills

In 1365, the future Saint Catherine of Siena — Caterina Benincasa, then in her late teens — made a journey to the area around Cosona, passing through this same territory, to meet the English mercenary captain John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto), who was wintering his army in the area. Her mission: to persuade him to abandon his wars and join a Crusade to the Holy Land. She documented the visit in her own letters. It is a remarkable footnote — one of the most venerated women in Christian history, negotiating with one of the most feared soldiers of the 14th century, somewhere very close to where you are now.

The View from Spedalone — Painted in 1338

In 1338–39, the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti completed the Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government in the Sala dei Nove of Siena's Palazzo Pubblico — a fresco cycle commissioned by the city's nine governing magistrates. The rural panel, Effects of Good Government in the Country, depicts a landscape of rolling chalk hills, cultivated farmland, fortified villages on conical peaks, and an open sky: exactly the view from this terrace.

Lorenzetti's fresco is considered the first work in central Italian art in which the rural landscape plays a central and autonomous role — a full three centuries before landscape painting became a recognised genre. It has been described as a political manifesto of Sienese governance, arguing that good government produces a beautiful, well-tended countryside. When UNESCO designated the Val d'Orcia a World Heritage Site in 2004, they cited this painting explicitly: the landscape you see from Spedalone has been considered one of the most beautiful and significant in the world since at least 1338.

The Plague That Remade the World — and Created the 22 Families

The Black Death arrived in Siena in May 1348. By summer the city had lost between 30 and 50% of its population. In the countryside — in these fields — the effect was equally catastrophic. Farms were abandoned. Labour became scarce overnight.

On 20 August 1348, Bernardo Tolomei — founder of the Olivetani order that would own and reshape Spedalone — died. Not in his hilltop hermitage but in the streets of Siena, where he had gone to nurse the dying. He contracted plague and died with them.

The solution to the post-plague labour crisis was the mezzadria — the sharecropping contract that would govern Spedalone for the next three centuries. Under mezzadria, a tenant family received the use of the land, a farmhouse, seed and a pair of oxen. In return, they delivered half of every harvest to the Olivetani. By 1500, sharecroppers comprised roughly 50% of Tuscany's rural population. The system, born from catastrophe, proved remarkably stable. The first name in our register of 22 families — Niccolò di Michele di Guidotto, 1477, seven and a half moggia of grain — is a direct consequence of August 1348.

The Man Behind the Monks Who Built Our Olive Grove

The Olivetani order that would own Spedalone and plant its olive trees was founded in 1313 by Bernardo Tolomei — a Sienese nobleman, lawyer and professor who, after a profound religious crisis and a period of blindness, retired to a remote hilltop south-east of Siena called the Desert of Accona with two companions: Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini. Piccolomini — a member of the same Sienese dynasty who would lease Spedalone two centuries later — was among the three co-founders of the order that would shape this land.

The congregation was approved in 1319, recognised by Pope Clement VI in 1344, and grew rapidly, acquiring land across Tuscany through donations from wealthy Sienese families. When plague swept Siena in 1348, Bernardo returned from his hilltop monastery to care for the dying — and contracted the plague himself, dying on 20 August 1348. He was canonised by Pope Benedict XVI in April 2009. Sant'Anna in Camprena — the monastery just down the road from Spedalone — was founded by Bernardo Tolomei himself in 1332–34 as a hermitage. When the Olivetani began buying the land around Spedalone from 1381, Sant'Anna was already a 50-year-old established house, and the two properties were part of the same closely linked monastic network.

The Monks Who Planted Our Olive Trees

From 1381, the Olivetani monastic order — the same order that operated the nearby Monastery of Sant'Anna in Camprena, later a filming location for The English Patient — began systematically acquiring the lands surrounding Spedalone. The monastery just down the road from Spedalone has its own extraordinary history: founded by Bernardo Tolomei himself in 1332–34, it was chosen in 1995–96 by director Anthony Minghella as the ruined Italian villa where Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche's characters shelter in his film — which won 9 Academy Awards, 2 Golden Globes and 6 BAFTAs. And centuries before that, the painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (Il Sodoma) completed his first significant commission at Sant'Anna in Camprena — the refectory frescoes — which so impressed the abbot of Monte Oliveto that he was invited to paint the great fresco cycle there that made his career. The monastery a short walk from Spedalone helped launch one of the most celebrated painters of the Italian Renaissance. A series of notarial acts from 1381–1393 preserved in the monastery's archive documents the Olivetani land purchases around Spedalone: parcels at Colle Aruscioli, La Fornace, Criolo and a dozen other named places in the Corte di Castelmozzo, all feeding into the consolidated Olivetani estate.

During this same period, the monks built the extraordinary dry-stone crescent terraces on the hillside below the farmhouse by hand — and planted the olive grove upon them. The trees you see in our oliveto today are those same trees: over 700 years old, still fruiting every autumn, still producing extraordinarily high-polyphenol oil. The ancient crescent retaining walls, semicircular and built without mortar, are among the last surviving examples of this medieval agricultural technique in all of Tuscany.

The trees carry a further secret. Of approximately forty ancient olives on the estate, the dominant variety is Canino/Olivastra — a cultivar native not to Tuscany but to the Viterbo area and the hills north of Rome. It has no natural reason to be in the Val d'Orcia. The Via Francigena, however, ran directly through the Canino heartland on its journey north from Rome. Someone carried these trees up the pilgrimage road — almost certainly monks maintaining connections to the network's Roman terminus. The olive grove is a botanical fossil of the road that made Spedalone possible in the first place.

Still the "Spedale" — A Farm of Three Families

In 1439, a Valdorcia land survey still records the estate under its medieval hospital name — Spedale Comignoli or Cimigliuoli — in the Corte di Castelmuzio, classified as a "Comunità di I Classe, meno di tre paia di buoi, tutti mezzadri": a first-class community, fewer than three pairs of ploughing oxen, all sharecroppers. The old name lingers for another two decades.

Pope Pius II — He Rode Past Our Front Door

The road running directly in front of Podere Spedalone is described in the Commentarii of Pope Pius II — Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the Renaissance humanist Pope who was born in nearby Corsignano (which he promptly renamed Pienza in his own honour). Born in 1405 as the eldest of eighteen children, his family were noble but poor — and the young Enea Silvio actually helped his father work the family estate at Corsignano. He ploughed, tended vines and walked these fields before he became a scholar, diplomat and finally Pope. The road past Spedalone was, quite literally, his backyard.

In his memoirs he describes his later journey from Sant'Anna in Camprena to Monte Oliveto Maggiore — "six miles," he notes — and comments pointedly on the difficulty of the clay soil:

"The earth, pressed by the horses' hooves, yields and does not release them unless the horse has exerted its full force." — Pius II, Commentarii

The only route covering that exact distance runs: Sant'Anna in Camprena → Spedalone → La Spessa → Lucignano → Ferrano → Chiusure → Monte Oliveto Maggiore. The road he described was already Olivetan property. He also suppressed the Abbey of Sant'Antimo in 1462, attaching it to his newly created Diocese of Montalcino-Pienza. Pius II died in 1464 in Ancona, having assembled a fleet in a last attempt to lead a crusade against the advancing Ottoman Turks.

Fra Tommaso Ragnoni's Inheritance — Spedalone Formally Olivetan

In 1457, the estate — still formally called Comignoli or Spedale Comignoli in the Corte di Castelmuzio — passed formally to the Olivetani Monastery of San Benedetto di Siena through the inheritance of Fra Tommaso Ragnoni, together with the Podere di Poggio Ragnuzzi e Coppaio. This is the moment Spedalone first appears in the monastery's continuous archive. In 1484, the monastery extended its holding further, purchasing the adjoining property at Spedale Cimignoli — arable land, woodland, olive groves and vineyards — from Tommè di Duccio Saracini for 235 fiorini, notarised by two Sienese officials. A 16th-century property inventory by Lucia Bonelli Conenna confirms Spedalone still belonging to the Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore in that period.

The Monks, the Taxman & the Survey of 1574

Annual taxes payable to the Comune di Siena for both Spedale Comignoli and the adjacent Poggio Ragnuzzi — including a census of 30 soldi due every 15 August to the Opera della Cattedrale di Siena — were formalised in a notarised agreement of 7 March 1514 and guaranteed by the Community of Castelmozzo. Sharecroppers were also liable for 3 lire per pair of ploughing oxen.

In 1574, the boundaries of the entire estate were walked and formally documented. The description reads like a poem of the landscape: from the little bridge at the Bagnaccio towards Sant'Anna under the Selva Domenici, along the road to Pienza, past the ridge and down through a small ruined hill, past the land of the Nuns of Monna Agnese, through drainage ditches and arginali, past the vineyard of San Giorgio, to the porche of the worked land — and back. The witnesses included names still connected to the area centuries later: Sandro di Billo Spannocchi, Olivo Ciacci of Camprena, the Prior and the Cellarer of Sant'Anna.

The Piccolomini Lease

In 1560, Podere Spedalone was formally leased to Annibale Piccolomini — a member of one of Siena's most powerful and historically significant dynasties. The Piccolomini family's Val d'Orcia roots run deep: in 1220 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II granted the family lands in this valley, and they produced two popes (Pius II and his nephew Pius III), a co-founder of the Olivetani order (Ambrogio Piccolomini, 1313), and generations of bishops, cardinals and imperial generals. The tenancy at Spedalone ran sixteen years before being dissolved in 1576, recorded in both the monastery's main archive (Book NN) and its contract register (Book UU).

Grand Duke Leopold Travels Through

In the modern era, the territory around Spedalone attracted two notable 18th-century visitors. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold — future Emperor of Austria — passed through the area on several occasions and described his journeys in his reports on the governance of Tuscany (Relazioni sul governo della Toscana). His interest reflected the broader Leopoldine agricultural reform programme that was, among other things, reviving the mezzadria system across Sienese territory and improving the local road network — both directly relevant to Spedalone.

The Night Rocks Fell from a Clear Sky

On the evening of 16 June 1794, a meteorite shower fell on the territory of Cosona in perfectly clear sky conditions, terrifying the local population. The event was witnessed and written up by Giorgio Santi — a Pienza-born naturalist who taught at the University of Pisa and the Sorbonne in Paris — in his Viaggio al Monte Amiata:

"…around seven in the evening there appeared in clear sky a long dark cloud at such great height…it seemed one could hear in the distance a battery of cannons. In the very instant of those explosions, a large quantity of stones fell from the cloud onto the territory of Cosona, with such whistling and force that all the inhabitants of those fields were terrified…" — Giorgio Santi

Santi kept the stones. The event was reported in Italian and European scientific journals and is now recognised as one of the first documented meteorite events in Italian scientific literature to generate serious scholarly analysis. Somewhere in our fields, there may still be fragments.

The Loggia, the Oven — and Three Families

In 1850, the farmhouse was substantially renovated. The beautiful loggia — the covered arcade that shades our courtyard today — was added to the lower wing, along with the great wood-fired oven. Until approximately 1960, three entire farming families lived and worked the full 33 hectares of the estate. Around 45 people. The ground floor housed working oxen, sheep and horses. The same spaces where livestock once rested now welcome guests in very different — but equally warm — comfort.

Podere Spedalone Now — History You Can Stay In

After 1,400 years, Podere Spedalone is a living, working, certified organic farm — 33 hectares of ancient woodland, olive groves, kitchen garden, open pasture and cultivated land in the Val d'Orcia UNESCO World Heritage Site near Pienza. Formally listed as Aggregato n.1 in the Pienza Piano Strutturale — the most significant protected agricultural aggregate in the entire territory.

The farm. Organic certified (IT-BIO-004, Suolo e Salute). Approximately forty ancient olive trees, predominantly the rare Canino/Olivastra variety — native to Lazio, carried north along the Via Francigena by the monks who planted them — are harvested by hand each November and cold-pressed to produce four estate olive oils. The kitchen garden grows tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines, herbs and seasonal vegetables that feed the restaurant directly. Saffron is cultivated on the estate. The wood-fired oven built into the 1850 loggia bakes the bread served at every meal.

The animals. Five horses — Amira, Farfalla, Serenity, Querido and Ambra — share the estate. A pack of Maremma sheepdogs guards the property as they have done on these hills for centuries. Trained truffle dogs work the same oak woodland that sheltered the hospital's pilgrims seven hundred years ago.

La Pecora Bianca. The farm-to-table restaurant serves lunch and dinner using ingredients grown, foraged, aged or pressed within a few hundred metres of the table. The menu changes with the seasons and the garden. At the communal table each evening, strangers become friends in the way people always have when they share good food after a long journey.

The rooms. Sixteen rooms and suites in the medieval farmhouse — some vaulted in ancient stone, some with views across the Orcia valley, some in the converted stables and granaries of the working farm. The oldest walls are those of the 7th-century lookout tower.

Experiences. Truffle hunting in the ancient woodland with trained lagotto dogs. Horse riding across estate paths walked for two thousand years. Cooking classes in the farmhouse kitchen. Wine tasting with producers from the surrounding consortia — Brunello, Orcia DOC, Nobile di Montepulciano. Wellness and massage. Swimming pool overlooking the UNESCO valley.

Open 363 days a year — one of the very few agriturismi in the Val d'Orcia that doesn't shut for winter. Because the history here doesn't take a winter break, and neither do we.