Your home in Tuscia
Five bedrooms, five bathrooms, generous communal spaces, five hectares of hilltop land — open fields, olive groves, a large garden and a swimming pool. Rented whole, one week at a time.
The setting
On one side the valley of Bagnoregio, its calanchi — badlands — folding away in grey-yellowish waves, with the medieval Civita hamlet balanced on its rock. On the others, olive groves, oak woods, Santa Maria XVII century castle and a horizon of Umbrian hills. The mist sits in the valley until about nine. At seven in the evening the whole thing goes copper for twenty minutes.
The house sits alone at the top of its own land. No neighbours, no shared driveway, no other guests. There is a helipad, an e-vehicle charging point, e-bikes in the barn, and a pool that faces the best of it.
Forty-four old olive trees, each giving four to six litres of oil in a normal year, and two hundred young ones we planted that produce nothing yet. Cherries, pears, apples, apricots, peaches, figs, almonds, plums and pomegranates are going in, so that from May to October the fruit on the table comes from the field, and once Monica has boiled it down to jam, it goes to the breakfast tarts too.
The restoration
There is no record of the year it was built — peasant houses rarely got one. The oldest documents we found are 18th century, and Il Casone is already on them. We bought it in December 2023 and spent two full years on the restoration. Some went wrong along the way (showers floors laid with the wrong angle, twice), but one thing went unexpectedly right: under a layer of modern plaster we found an old painted wall.
Every floor is laid with traditional terracotta tiles; Marco in nearby Vetriolo still makes them by hand one after the other, and you have to be lucky if yours will be slotted into the next firing of the kiln. They warm in the afternoon and never look new — which is the point.
Rustic chestnut and oak beams carry the same handmade tiles overhead. Nothing was straightened, nothing was replaced with a copy.
You won't find two identical doors, all rescued and rehung, all different in style and size, bearing old rusty iron hardware. Wardrobes, trunks and tables with a century of use in them, local porcelain on the shelves, warm rustic lighting rather than downlights.
Local stone for two shower walls and for the monolithic kitchen — the one openly contemporary gesture in the house.
Because the cask was here first, and it was too beautiful to burn.
Two thin lines of light running the length of the stone vault: one of very few 21st century personal touches we allowed within these 18th century walls.
Art in the house is deliberately sparse. Alongside the rustic pieces you will find work from the Funzioni d'Onda series by Akelo — Andrea Cagnetti — a goldsmith and sculptor born in this province and exhibited well beyond it. One wave of polished metal against an old plastered wall is enough.