I’m a spirit animal sceptic. But I’d make an exception for the fox that turned to look at me with cool composure, before trotting off through some hidden volpine portal in the boundary fence just as I turned into the driveway of Paolo and Maria Cattaneo’s family house in the Tuscan Maremma region.
When I mentioned the vision to la signora Maria, it confirmed her suspicions about an unfortunate incident in the chicken coop a few days earlier. But as I chatted to the couple about this bucolic refuge from their other life in urban Turin, another explanation suggested itself. The fox was simply continuing a glorious tradition.
La Maremma has long been associated with hunting. Malaria was rife in the marshy wetlands towards the coast, but so were wildfowl; in the hinterland, meanwhile, wild boar roamed in a landscape of low hills covered in garrigue and oak woods. Sparsely populated, this Italian Camargue was celebrated for its huge herds of long-horned Maremmano cattle, tended by rough Tuscan cowboys known as butteri. Back from the coast, in the remoter corners of vast landed estates, banditry thrived, actively supported by locals who felt used by their feudal overlords and abandoned by the state.
It was only towards the end of the 18th century, under Peter Leopold – Austrian Grand Duke of Tuscany, and brother to Marie Antoinette – that the state began to take a real interest in an area that could not have been further from the cultured urban elegance of Florence. The radical Grand Duke set about draining the marshes and dismantling the feudal system in order to encourage agricultural progress. He also reformed the Tuscan customs network and had several of its customs houses built or restored – including one at Pescia Fiorentina, close to the region’s southern border with what were then the Papal States.
When Italy was unified in 1871, the now superfluous customs house reverted to the local landowners, who later sold it, alongside a swathe of territory and other properties to a family of industrialists from Viareggio, the Magrinis. It’s here that an illustrious personage enters the story: Giacomo Puccini. In between writing bagatelles like La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, the opera composer loved to hunt. Mutual friends introduced him to Angiolino Magrini, who sang the praises of the plentiful game around the Pescia Fiorentina customs house – which his family had converted into a hunting lodge. Puccini came, bagged ducks and boar, and remained a lifelong friend of Magrini. He was even summoned to the composer’s deathbed in Brussels, where, shortly before expiring, the by now voiceless musician enquired, in gestures, about how the hunting season had gone that autumn.
Paolo Cattaneo points out the plaque commemorating Puccini’s sojourns as we enter a house whose foursquare regularity is softened, outside, by a second skin of climbing plants. He and his wife Maria acquired the place towards the end of the 1970s, when Paolo was working on a project in the area. It came complete with furniture and paintings left by Angiolino’s cousin Nella Magrini, an intrepid huntress herself. In a full-length portrait above the drinks cabinet, we see her dressed in beautifully tailored ladies’ shooting attire. She smiles briskly for the artist, but, riding crop in hand, seems impatient to join the hunt.
What attracted the Cattaneos to the property, Paolo says, is the fact that ‘it was neither a typical Tuscan farmhouse, nor a typical Tuscan villa’. The customs houses that Peter Leopold commissioned in the 1780s were solid, handsome edifices of three storeys or more, with pitched roofs that gave them the look of functional townhouses plonked down in the countryside. Downstairs, in four large rooms where traders and cattle drovers would once have warmed themselves in front of the fire while the Medici border guards checked their wares, the ceilings are almost as high as the floors are wide. As a result, these communal family living spaces become airy extensions of the garden outside – something less easily achieved in the classic Tuscan villa, where the lofty layer was the first-floor piano nobile.
The Pescia Fiorentina house grew organically alongside the Cattaneo family, which today spans five children (among them prize-winning Italian novelist Benedetta Cibrario) and 14 grandchildren. ‘At the beginning, we did very little except install central heating,’ Maria tells me. ‘We wanted to keep the spirit of the place.’ Paolo adds that ‘what you see is an accumulation of things made over several years, one that reflects our taste’.
‘Accumulation’ and ‘taste’ are the key words in this modest statement. The summer drawing room, a pre-existing addition which juts out from one side of the house towards the garden, is a masterclass in tasteful accretion. On one wall, a suzani hanging and a series of floral cushions lead the eye towards the garden, broken up into a series of leafy tableaux by the panels in the old-school iron French windows; on another, a sofa covered in a pastoral toile de jouy pattern and a symmetrical block of framed Romantic prints of Alpine landscapes prepare the visitor who has strolled in from the garden for the warm curatorial elegance of the inner sanctum beyond.
Here, contemporary paintings by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta Fioroni are ably inserted in a mix that has rich stories embedded within. A framed black-and-white photograph of Paolo’s father, seated on a sofa aged ten in 1920, is placed on one wall below a decadent landscape-with-ruins by a Spanish painter of around the same time. Look closely at the photo, and you see the same painting hanging on a wall behind the lounging ragazzo. By the time Paolo came onto the scene, the canvas, with its lurid sunset, had disappeared from his father’s life. But browsing through an auction catalogue one day, Paolo and Maria’s art restorer daughter Lalla recognised one of the lots on offer as that painting. She bought it as a surprise Christmas present for her father – enabling him to reunite it, on the wall, with his own father, creating a kind of genealogical feedback loop.
Conceived as a series of rooms, the garden is full of secret spaces, including a fern collection under a slatted wooden dome that feels more Amazon rainforest than Tuscan coast. Planted by Maria and Paolo, this Maremmano Sissinghurst (WoI July 2023) grew organically over more than three decades. It all looks beautifully thought out, although in fact, Maria tells me, there was never a masterplan. If it seems that way, she adds, it’s probably thanks to the generous advice of legendary Italian landscape architect Paolo Pejrone, a lifelong friend of the couple and a frequent house guest (WoI Sept 2022). ‘When we’re walking in the garden with him,’ Maria confides, ‘he’ll limit himself to saying every now and again, “If I were you, I’d do this.”’ If there’s one thing better than a garden designed by Paolo Pejrone, it is perhaps a garden that il maestro has kept a watchful eye on for over 30 years.
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