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The Costanti of Montalcino

Notaries, neighbors, mayors and Brunello makers beside the Tamanti

Few families of Montalcino stood beside the Tamanti as often as the Costanti. They drew up the Tamanti’s deeds, advised them in their affairs, governed the town with them and lived a few doors away on the same street. Two Costanti sisters married into the Galassi and the Angelini; a Costanti showed one of the first wines ever called Brunello; and a Costanti mayor gave Ing. Giovanni Tamanti’s coffin a resting place in his own chapel. The family still makes Brunello on the hill of Colle al Matrichese, just below the town.

An old name in the town

The name is among the oldest in Montalcino’s records. In 1382 a Cristoforo Costanti raised an altar to Blessed Filippino, and in 1542 the heirs of Raffaello Costanti gave thirty-six scudi to the hospital of Santa Maria della Croce beside Francesco Menchini and the Landi. When the Imperial armies closed around the hill on Good Friday 1553, Bernardino di Cristofano Costanti was gonfaloniere. In 1676 Scipione Costanti stood on the Grand Duke’s list of the richest landowners beside Dr. Giacomo Tamanti, and by the family’s account two brothers, Crescenzio and Carlo, fought for the Republic of Venice and came home as counts in 1711.

Villa Il Colle and the Madonna of Matrichese

The family’s villa, Il Colle, stood on the ridge of Matrichese below the town. When the little country church of Santa Maria a Matrichese was closed in 1786, the Costanti carried its venerated fresco of the Madonna of Sorrows into the chapel that Crescenzio Costanti had built at the villa. Crescenzio, treasurer of the hospital, showed the family’s nerve in June 1799, when the insurgents of the “Viva Maria” came for the hospital’s money: he sent their leader out of his house at pistol-point and slipped away disguised as a peasant.

One family, now joined in the registers

For a long time the storybook’s Costanti tree stood in four separate branches. A search of the civil and parish registers on the Portale Antenati in November 2026 joined them all under Crescenzio Costanti and Maria Tommei. Crescenzio had died before June 1813. His children were Carlo, born in 1775, a legal procurator who also painted and who died in 1848; Luigi, a land surveyor; Angela; Caterina, who married Emilio Ducci of San Quirico in June 1813; Antonio, rector of the town hospital, who married Maria Pieri in 1818 and died in 1878; the notary Mario, born in 1798; and the lawyer Giovanni, born in 1777, who at forty-two married sixteen-year-old Violante Passalacqua at Grosseto in 1820. Their son Marco, by his own death act, was born there, and with his brother Alamanno he came back to Montalcino.

Mario drew the deeds by which Dr. Antonio Tamanti bought the Brunacci farms of Capanna and Madonna del Piano in 1839, and Antonio Costanti took the place of Flavio Angelini as adviser to the aged Filandro Tamanti in 1831.

Tito Costanti and the Brunello of 1865

Tito Costanti, the notary Mario’s son, is the name the wine world remembers. Born on 30 August 1827, he became a lawyer and notary himself and, from 1866 for some thirty years, the town’s secretary. At the Siena wine exhibition of Carnival 1870 he showed wines of 1865 and 1869 already called Brunello, beside Clemente Santi’s and the Galassi brothers’. At Sant’Angelo in Colle he was one of the founders of the village band, the Società Filarmonica, on 1 May 1885. His younger brother Curzio, very probably the Curzio Costanti who marched to Curtatone with the town’s students in 1848, died unmarried on 30 October 1857, aged twenty-three, and Tito later gave the name to a son. By Teresa Santini he had a daughter, Mustiola, who married Niccolò Bruni in 1879; by Cesira Bruzzichelli, whose sister Settimia was the widow of a Marri-Mignanelli with a villa at Suvignano near Siena, he had Isabella, Curzio and Mario, the last born on 31 July 1880. Tito died in 1909, and his death was entered by Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti. His son, Avv. Mario Costanti, defended Giuseppe Tamanti in a dispute of honor and showed the family’s wine at Siena in 1933.

The sisters who joined three families

Alamanno Costanti, son of the lawyer Giovanni and Violante Passalacqua, married Elisa Lunghetti at Siena in 1868, and they had two daughters. Violante married Francesco Galassi in 1887 and named her first son, born in November 1888, Vincenzo Alamanno after her father; a month later she died, at nineteen. Adele married Orazio Angelini, son of Giulio Angelini and Carlotta Del Fà, in 1892 (Giulio, born at Camigliano on 18 July 1838, had married Carlotta there in August 1859, and she died at Montalcino on 14 October 1906), and their children, Violante in 1893, Otello in 1896 and Aldo in 1899, were born at the Villa del Colle. Otello was working as a laborer at Grosseto when he married there in 1932; by then both his parents were dead. With Flavio Angelini’s marriage to Annunziata Galassi, three marriages in one generation bound the Costanti, the Galassi and the Angelini together.

Mayor Giovanni Costanti

Cav. Ing. Giovanni Costanti was the son of Marco Costanti, born at Grosseto, the town’s justice of the peace in 1866, who died at the Villa del Colle on 31 October 1887, and of Emilia Fratini of Livorno. In 1907 Giovanni and Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti led the coalition that won the town hall: Costanti became mayor and Tamanti his deputy. Costanti was mayor through the First World War, and in October 1924, when Ing. Giovanni Tamanti’s remains came home from the front, they rested in the chapel of Costanti’s villa Il Colle before the funeral.

Emilio Costanti and Colle al Matrichese

The mayor’s son, Dr. Emilio Costanti, born at Villa Il Colle in 1906 with Avv. Giuseppe Tamanti as witness to the register, became a physician but never let go of Il Colle. His mother was Argia Palmerini, whom his father had married about 1904, very probably in her own town, for the wedding is not in the Montalcino registers of 1902–1905. In 1951 Emilio travelled to Brazil: the immigration cards of Rio de Janeiro record his arrival that year. In the early 1960s he began to sell the Brunello of Colle al Matrichese beyond the circle of family and friends, and on 28 April 1967 he was one of the twenty-five founders of the Brunello Consorzio, beside Giovanni Colombini, Giuliana Tamanti’s husband. Shortly before his death in 1983 he entrusted the house and vineyards to a great-nephew, who has kept the Costanti name on the bottle ever since.

Still to find

Marco’s and Alamanno’s birth acts at Grosseto; Crescenzio’s death act, attached to Caterina’s marriage of 1813; the parents of Cesira Bruzzichelli; and the place and date of Giovanni Costanti’s marriage to Argia Palmerini.

Sources

This page is drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 3.74, November 2026), chapter “The Costanti”, where every fact carries a full archival reference. All connected families · Back to the Tamanti family history.