Fabio Petrucci
Why the collection stops at five
Fabio Petrucci was born and raised among the vineyards and olive groves of this part of Tuscany, and Tuscany Like began with a single conviction: that a great house is worth more looked after properly than let out constantly.
Five is about the ceiling of what one person can know room by room — which bedroom catches the morning light, which shutter swells in August, how many people can eat under the pergola before it stops being comfortable. A dozen would need a staff, and a staff needs a manager, and at that point nobody who answers the telephone has ever slept in the house.
So the answer to "how many houses do you have" is five, and each was added only once he knew it as well as the last.
The restorations
Just after 1500
Ravano is built, and puts its arms over the door
At the foot of Monte Pisano, between Pisa and Lucca. The coat of arms above the entrance still dates it; the nineteenth century added length, and 2006 added the bathrooms.
Fifteenth century
Lungomonte is built as a hunting lodge
On the slope above Asciano Pisano, facing the plain towards the sea. Frescoes and vaulting from later centuries; the bones are Medici.
Nineteenth century
Guardavalle is built as a country house
Lower, plainer and domestic, in the Colline Pisane — built to be lived in rather than to be seen from the road.
After the war
Lungomonte stands largely empty
Too big to run and too costly to mend, which is the ordinary fate of a house of that size in Italy.
The restoration
Roof, frescoes, and only then bathrooms
Structure and surviving decoration first, comfort second — the opposite order to the one that makes a house photograph well in its first season and age badly.
Since
All of them let whole, one party at a time
Never a single room, never two parties on the land at once. It is the only way a private house stays a private house.
Where the name comes from
Before the houses there was the events work, and it is still the trade Fabio knows best: what a lawn actually holds, where the light falls in September, which suppliers turn up early and which turn up at all.
That experience is why weddings and private celebrations happen easily in these buildings — Ravano has a consecrated chapel, and a lawn that has held ceremonies of well over a hundred. It is also why the line about introducing rather than selling matters: he has spent long enough on the other side of it to know exactly whose problem a late florist is.
One telephone number, and it is answered
Fabio meets you at the gate, walks you through the building and tells you the things a manual does not: which door sticks, where the shade goes at four, which of the two ovens is honest about its temperature.
After that he leaves you alone — nobody else is on the land — but the number works. In eleven years the calls have been about a broken pump, a lost passport and, once, a birthday cake.