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Maria Tamanti and Clemente Santi, 1819

In February 1819 a twenty-year-old landowner from one of Montalcino’s old families married a young pharmacist with a scientific education. Neither could have known that their grandson would give the town its most famous wine. This page tells the story of Maria Tamanti and Clemente Santi: the marriage itself, the man Clemente was, the daughter born that December, and the land the Santi family held around them.

The marriage of 12 February 1819

The marriage act of 12 February 1819 (original on Antenati) was entered as act 8 in the civil register for the parish of Sant’Egidio. It describes Maria as a landowner aged twenty and names her parents as Francesco Tamanti and Appollonia Bardi. This matches Lucia Carle’s published genealogy, which places Maria, with her brother Gaetano (b. 1801), in the branch of Dr Francesco Tamanti (b. 1757) and Apollonia Bardi (Carle, La patria locale, 1996, p. 292). Earlier drafts of this history tried placing Maria as a daughter of an Antonio Tamanti. The 1819 act rules that out. Maria lived until 1864; her brother Gaetano (1801–1861) never married, and Carle’s reconstruction reportedly has substantial property of his passing to her daughter Caterina. Both have pages among the Tamanti family leaders (Maria, Gaetano).

Marriage of Clemente Santi and Maria Tamanti (dau. of Francesco and Appollonia Bardi)
Marriage of Clemente Santi and Maria Tamanti (dau. of Francesco and Appollonia Bardi). Restoration civil register, S. Egidio, act 8. Evidence E09. Original online.

The act also names Clemente’s mother. Her surname is partly hidden in the entry, but the cadastre spells it out as “Canali ne’ Santi Petronilla”, which supports reading it as Canali. A witness was Giacomo Tamanti, an elderly bachelor of the family who died that October aged 78, according to his death record of 1 October 1819 (original on Antenati).

Maria brought property to the marriage. The published Biondi-Santi family history calls her a landowner whose dowry included Montalcino farms, named as Colombaio and Chiusa (Boldrini, Bruchi and Cappelli, This Is My Land, 2010, pp. 18–19). The dowry act itself has not been found. Without it, the exact farms and terms remain unconfirmed. The Chiusa at least cannot have been part of it: Maria and Gaetano were full sister and brother, both children of Dr Francesco and Apollonia Bardi, and Gaetano still held the Chiusa house in 1820 and “his podere Chiusa” in 1840. It very probably reached Maria’s line by inheritance after Gaetano died unmarried in 1861. Which farms, if any, she did bring in 1819 is not yet proved; her marriage settlement is the record that would settle it.

Clemente Santi: a scientific formation

Clemente was born in Montalcino in 1795 to Luigi Santi, of a Pienza family, and Petronilla Canali. He studied at Siena and Pisa and was a pupil of Giorgio Santi, the Pienza naturalist whose work joined natural history, agronomy and close observation of the landscape. Giorgio sat as a commissioner at Clemente’s graduation. After the scientist’s death Clemente helped look after his surviving papers, and letters from Giorgio’s widow in 1839 show material being sent under his direction (Bindi, Giorgio Santi, 2014, pp. 59–63). Clemente called Giorgio his prozio, his great-uncle. Bindi warns, however, that the family tree he examined does not show the exact link, so the kinship is still unproven.

The Santi had come from Pienza. Clemente’s grandfather, the elder Clemente, moved to Montalcino in 1745 to run the hospital pharmacy on the market square, and his father, Luigi, was born at Montalcino on 22 May 1759 and baptized in the cathedral by the provost Jacopo Begni (the age on his death act points to 1757–58, his own memoir to about 1760). The elder Clemente’s sister Novilia, born at Pienza about 1744 and perhaps a half-sister, followed him to Montalcino and married Romualdo Padelletti, the earliest bond between the Santi and the Padelletti; her death act of 3 July 1821, which names her father Livio, her mother Maria Diana Minucci and her late husband Romualdo Padelletti, proves the marriage, and shows that when Maria Tamanti married into the Santi in 1819 her husband’s great-aunt was still living in the town (more on the Padelletti). The Santi married the Canali twice, which long confused the generations: Luigi’s own death act names his mother as Caterina Canali, so the elder Clemente had also taken a Canali wife, while Luigi married Petronilla Canali. Luigi died on 10 April 1841, aged eighty-one (his death act says eighty-three). Clemente himself lived to ninety and died “nella casa posta in Villa del Greppo”, in the house at the Villa del Greppo, on 22 April 1885.

Luigi Santi’s memoir of Bishop Francesco Pio Santi, written in 1831, lets the two older generations speak a little. Pienza, he says, was a poor town, and the Santi were among its “meno povere”, its least poor families. His grandfather Livio was bound to Dr Rutilio Santi, father of the naturalist Giorgio, “con parentela, ma più con una decisa e costante amicizia”, by kinship but still more by a firm and lasting friendship, and about 1741–42 Livio signed the town’s letters of welcome to a new bishop as vice-chancellor of the commune of Pienza. The elder Clemente, the apothecary, was also a singer: in 1777, when the bishop opened his enlarged collegiate church at Pitigliano and called the amateur musicians of Montalcino to perform, Luigi went “col mio violino, e venne pure mio Padre come cantore”, with my violin, and my father came as well, as a singer.

Luigi had a younger half-brother who stayed in Pienza. Livio Santi, born on 29 May 1774, kept the family papers there, and in 1809 became the civil commissioner of the town’s Conservatorio di San Carlo, where his sister Violante lived under her religious name, Margherita; she was the Violante born at Montalcino on 31 July 1763, daughter of the elder Clemente and Caterina Canali, who took the habit at San Carlo on 29 September 1783. Livio died at Pienza in May 1843, very probably on the 11th, an unmarried landowner “attendente agli affari di Casa”, looking after the family’s affairs. His death act names his parents as the late Clemente and the late Rosa Rossi. The elder Clemente therefore married at least twice: first Caterina Canali, Luigi’s mother, and later Rosa Rossi, Livio’s. On Livio’s death the Santi house in Via Elisa at Pienza passed to his nephews, Clemente and his brother Tullio.

The Biondi-Santi family history says Clemente studied pharmaceuticals at Pisa, kept up his ties to scientific and agrarian circles, and experimented with the wines of his Montalcino properties (Boldrini, Bruchi and Cappelli, This Is My Land, 2010, pp. 18–29). He also saw the farm as a connected system. In January 1864 he complained in print that the woods were being cut “per soverchia sete di denaro”, out of excessive thirst for money, for bark and charcoal. As a result “la palina sì necessaria alle nostre piante e vigneti”, the stake so necessary to our vines, had become scarce and dear: from 80 centesimi or a lira a hundred to “due lire e più”, when “each of our vines needs two of these supports” (Giornale Agrario Toscano, n.s. X, p. 423). His civic standing grew too: Carle records him admitted as Gonfaloniere, the town’s chief magistrate, in 1829–30 (Carle, La patria locale, 1996, pp. 81, 83).

Florence’s learned societies knew him early. At a sitting of February 1827 the Accademia dei Georgofili, the oldest farming academy in Europe, named “Clemente Santi di Montalcino” one of its corresponding members; he was thirty-one. On 24 August 1834 the antiquaries of the Società Colombaria made him a corresponding member too. In 1854 he printed at Montalcino a little treatise on growing saffron, and he sent the produce of Montalcino to every exhibition he could: at the Cascine of Florence in 1857 a vinegar and a spirit made from the fruit of the strawberry tree, with “Zafferano del suolo Montalcinese”, saffron of Montalcino soil; at the national exhibition of 1861, besides his wines, saffron, a cherry wine and a peach cordial, a mineral water and a collection of the rocks and minerals of the district. With his brother Tullio he also gave the town its library: when the Biblioteca comunale opened to the public in 1874 it held 5,500 volumes, “in parte donati dal dott. Clemente Santi e dall’avv. Tullio Santi Canali”, partly given by the two brothers.

Moscadello first, 1850–1870

Clemente’s fame as a wine-maker began with a sparkling sweet wine, not a red. In November 1850 the jury of the Tuscan exhibition at Florence praised “un ben grazioso Moscadelletto spumante”, a most charming sparkling Moscadello, of his making, and chose his Moscadello for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. He showed again at Florence in 1854. At the national exhibition in Florence in 1861 his entry in the official catalogue lists a “vino rosso puro”, a pure red wine, beside an Aleatico, a sparkling red, sparkling Moscatello, Vin Santo and Malvasia; the word Brunello does not appear. Four years later it does, but for a grape: Attilio Tassi’s 1865 survey of the agriculture of the province of Siena, which thanks Clemente among its informants, lists Brunello among the black grapes preferred around Montalcino. At the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 Clemente won two honourable mentions, one for his “Vin de Moscatel” and one for coloured earths and floating bricks; neither was for a red.

Only at the end of the decade did the grape’s name pass to a select red wine. In 1869 the agricultural committee of Montepulciano is said to have given Clemente two silver medals, for a “vino rosso scelto (brunello)” of 1865 and a sparkling Moscadello of 1867; later histories cite it as the earliest award to a wine named Brunello, but the prize list itself has not been traced. At the wine exhibition held at Siena in the Carnival of 1870, according to the Consorzio’s reading of the original records, three growers entered wines called Brunello: Santi with his 1865, Costanti and Galassi. By 1870, then, the name was on the wines of Clemente and of other Montalcino growers; it was his grandson Ferruccio who made a long-lived Brunello of the single grape the identity of the house.

A later web chronology by Mirco Sanchini and Stefano Cinelli Colombini places his wines at the London and Paris exhibitions of 1856. The printed records correct this: his sparkling Moscadello went to London in 1851, he exhibited at Florence in 1854, and his Paris honours came in 1867.

Clemente Santi in his own words, 1829–1865

Clemente wrote for the Giornale Agrario Toscano, the Florentine farm journal, for more than thirty years, and his letters show a grower who reported failures as frankly as successes. In March 1829 he asked the editors for plain teaching in plant physiology for working landowners. In October 1862 he reported that the vine disease oidium had been worse than ever in July and August: sulphur, “perhaps not used exactly”, had failed, the hill had lost more than a third of its crop, and “the coal dust I used gave no better, but a worse, result”.

He listened to the men who worked his vines. In July 1863 he wrote that sulphur strengthened the vine: “questo è l’asserto dei miei contadini, ed il fatto il comprova”, this is what my farmers assert, and the fact proves it. That September, under a line from Dante’s wood of suicides (“Perché mi schiante?”, why do you break me?), he attacked the custom of stripping the leaves from the vines before the harvest as a “barbara usanza” that robbed the “regina dei colli”, the queen of the hills. In December 1864 he warned against drawing red wine off its skins too soon: only “from a complete, regular fermentation” do red wines gain “their fine colour and the capacity to keep”.

His report on the vintage of 1865, the year whose red, by later accounts, won him a silver medal at Montepulciano in 1869, is the most striking. The grapes were “carichi di glucosio”, loaded with sugar, and those who waited for the early October rains did well. “Our wines have for some years been known abroad… sought after”, he wrote, and an experiment was under way to make sure they would survive a sea voyage “and the crossing of the line”, the equator, which he hoped would be “certainly victorious”. That was a hope, not a result: the outcome of the test is not known, and the report names no estate, grape or recipe.

Paolina, born December 1819

Ten months after the wedding, a daughter was born. The birth record of Paolina Santi (original on Antenati) records her birth at six in the evening on 13 December 1819 and her baptism the next day. It is act 86, the last birth entered in Montalcino that year. Her parents are listed as Clemente Santi and Maria Tamanti, landowners of the cathedral parish of San Salvatore.

Birth of Paolina Santi, daughter of Clemente Santi and Maria Tamanti
Birth of Paolina Santi, daughter of Clemente Santi and Maria Tamanti. Nati 1819, reg. 18, row 245, act 86. Evidence E11. Original online.

Paolina did not die in infancy. She died on 1 July 1839, at nineteen: the date, long known only from an online family tree, is now confirmed by her death act. A printed elegy, Melodia funebre in morte di Paolina Santi di Montalcino (Florence, 1839), signed “B.” and attributed to Sebastiano Brigidi, was almost certainly written for her; a copy is in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence but has not yet been read. Her younger sister Caterina, born in 1822, became Clemente and Maria’s surviving daughter, and it was Caterina who carried the line on.

The Santi and Canali lands in the cadastre

The Leopoldine cadastre, compiled for Montalcino in the years around 1820–1835, shows the Santi household as substantial landowners in its own right. Brian Pasch has reviewed roughly 725 owner-table pages for the whole commune. His figures are approximate section totals from that survey, not measurements of each parcel.

Clemente Santi di Luigi

Clemente appears on ledger page 1175 with about 75 hectares. Most of it lay at Fiesole (about 67 hectares, with a farmhouse). There were smaller holdings in Osservanza (original on CASTORE), where parcels 205–206 and 209–211 include a house with a threshing floor, and a parcel at Lumespento. No town house was found in his own name.

Petronilla Canali ne’ Santi

Clemente’s mother held far more: about 230 hectares on ledger page 396. Roughly 105 lay at Comunale, 38 each at Greppo and San Polo, and smaller amounts at Pelagrilli, Lumespento and Montosoli. She also owned two town houses. At Greppo, parcels 180–186 form a complete farm centre: a chapel, main house, farmhouse, gardens and threshing floor. The Greppo owner-table page (original on CASTORE) shows several of these buildings under her name.

Petronilla outlived her husband Luigi by more than seven years. On the evening of 3 December 1848 “Sig.ra Petronilla” Canali, a landowner, daughter of the late Niccolò and “vedova del fu Sig.r Luigi Santi”, widow of the late Luigi Santi, died at Montalcino in the cathedral parish, aged about eighty-four. Her age points to the Petronilla Canali baptised at Sant’Egidio on 28 June 1764, very probably the same woman. How the Greppo passed from her to Clemente after 1848 is not yet documented.

Tavole indicative, Tomo II p.173 — Petronilla Canali ne' Santi, Greppo farm centre
Tavole indicative, Tomo II p.173 — Petronilla Canali ne' Santi, Greppo farm centre. ASSi, Catasto Generale della Toscana. Evidence E27. Original online.

The Biondi-Santi winery today gives its address as Villa Greppo. Petronilla’s farm centre is the strongest lead for the origins of the later Il Greppo estate. The cadastre does not name that estate, though, and the chain of title between them has yet to be traced.

What the owner tables do not show

Maria Tamanti has no owner entry of her own anywhere in the survey, and no Biondi appears as an owner. A separate “Santi Luigi di Clemente” holds about nine hectares and a town house on ledger page 1176. He is very probably Clemente’s father, Luigi Santi, son of the elder Clemente, in whose name the 1832 town register also enters the family house on the piazza. Clemente was still adding land later: at an auction of former Santa Caterina property on 6 June 1846, he took Lot V under a perpetual lease (allivellazione) at an annual canon of 55 scudi, 5 lire and 17 soldi (Brandi, Studi e Trascrizioni). None of these entries shows which land, if any, came to Clemente through Maria’s dowry.

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