THE GREEN DREAM

Fendi creative director Silvia Venturini Fendi’s family country retreat represents a confluence of the Italian house’s timeless savoir-faire and the designer’s own eye on the future.

- Katherine Ormerod

Set at the end of a long drive flanked by centuries-old stone pines twisting crookedly up to the heavens, I Casali del Pino, the Fendi family’s country estate outside of Rome, evokes a 19th-century Italian landscape painting. Just six miles northwest of the Colosseum, the property predates the Roman Empire, and the family’s transformation of 430 acres into an organic farm adds to that sense of longevity.

It’s here that Silvia Venturini Fendi spends weekends with her sisters, Ilaria—who runs the farm’s operations—and Maria Teresa, and all of their children. “For me, it’s really a way of resetting from city life and working in fashion, which is very demanding,” Venturini Fendi says with characteristic understatement. Encompassing a terracotta farmhouse with pretty eau-de-Nil shutters, a dairy, an agritourism hotel with 16 rooms, an organic restaurant, and a flock of more than 1,000 sheep, I Casali del Pino isn’t pastoral posturing. “We bought this property for our children because we really believe the future will be about having a greener life,” she continues. “Ilaria has been an environmental activist for many years, and now we’re all learning to live in a simpler way.”