The Custom Of The Country

On 1,200 acres in Chianti, Italy, a 15thcentury monastery is now home to the Venetian shoe designer René Caovilla and his family, who have made the history and traditions of an ancient region their own.

- Gaby Wood

When René Caovilla, the 82-year-old Venetian shoe designer, was first shown the Tuscan villa he bought in 1977, he fell in love with it instantly. He wasn’t only taken with the house, a 15th-century red brick monastery that had undergone a slow transformation into an austere 20-bedroom private home in the 17th century, but the Chianti landscape as well — the whole of classical history evoked in a flash. Even now, the approach to the 1,200-acre property is just as it must have been centuries ago: a long, winding ride through pale, undulating fields, leading to a dignified hilltop retreat. The three-story ivy-wrapped building is ringed by 20-foot obelisk-like cypress trees — a private citadel entered through a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the vista of olive groves, another fortresslike outcropping is visible in the distance: the mottled russet city of Siena, three miles away.

“All the great Italian painters of the 14th and 15th centuries — Leonardo, Michelangelo — were born near here,” says Caovilla’s wife of 49 years, Paola Buratto Caovilla, on a warm September day. “When you come to this area, you breathe in everything they left behind. There’s a special light.” When her husband first saw the house, she says, “It made him dream of the paintings he’d seen since he was a little boy.”