Before Brunello made Montalcino famous, much of the countryside north and west of the town was worked by sharecroppers on the farms of a few landowning families. The Tamanti, who built and lived in Palazzo Tamanti, were among the largest. The Tuscan cadastre of 1820 drew every Tamanti field and farmhouse, and its owner registers name the owner of each numbered parcel. Laid over today’s aerial photographs, those sheets show that several of Montalcino’s best-known Brunello estates stand on farms the Tamanti once held.
Two farms never left the family and are still held by Tamanti descendants. The rest were sold, most of them between 1945 and 1970, and were bought, often by the families who had worked the land, in the years when Brunello was becoming a great wine. Each page below tells one estate’s origin story: what the Tamanti held there, how the land left the family, who holds it today, and what may still survive.
The wineries
- Le Chiuse Montalcino Origin Story: Gaetano Tamanti’s Chiusa farm, never sold, held by Tamanti descendants today.
- Casato Prime Donne Montalcino Origin Story: Il Casato, inherited by Giuliana Tamanti and passed to the Cinelli Colombini.
- Castello Romitorio Montalcino Origin Story: a castle the Tamanti held through most of the nineteenth century.
- Siro Pacenti Montalcino Origin Story: Pelagrilli, a Tamanti farm as early as 1692.
- Lambardi (Canalicchio di Sotto) Montalcino Origin Story: the Tamanti farmhouse of Canalicchio.
- Capanna Montalcino Origin Story: bought by Dr. Antonio Tamanti in 1839.
- Valdicava Montalcino Origin Story: Madonna del Piano, its chapel and a Tamanti fresco.
- Villa Poggio Salvi Montalcino Origin Story: Ermenegildo Tamanti’s farm in Santa Restituta.
- CastelGiocondo (Frescobaldi) Montalcino Origin Story: about 93 hectares of Tamanti land in 1820.
San Polo and San Polino. The largest single block of Tamanti land in 1820 lay not around the town but on the hills to the south-east, toward Castelnuovo dell’Abate: about 150 hectares in the cadastral section of San Polo, entered to Gaetano Tamanti di Francesco, with oak woods, pasture, and plowland planted with vines and olives, worked from two farmhouses. Both are Brunello estates today. The San Polo winery, owned since 2007 by the Allegrini family of Valpolicella, stands within about twenty meters of the San Polo farmhouse of 1820, and San Polino, Montalcino’s first certified organic estate, within about ten meters of the farmhouse of that name. Aerial photographs show the two houses still among grain fields and pasture in 1988; the vineyards came in the 1990s. How the land left Gaetano’s heirs is not yet known. The farms are described under San Polo.
Neighbours on the Montosoli hill
Several famous estates stand beside former Tamanti land but not on it. On Montosoli in 1820 the Tamanti shared the hill with the Brunacci, the Santi and the canons of San Lorenzo. Baricci’s Colombaio farm, the Montosoli villa and the Val di Cava farmhouse were Brunacci land, later the Angelini’s. Caparzo and Altesino lie next to Gaetano Tamanti’s farms of Macina and Collodini, but in 1820 they belonged to other families. Canalicchio di Sopra and Franco Pacenti stand on the land around the old Tamanti farmhouse of Canalicchio. Their stories are told within the pages above.
How these pages were built
The 1820 parcels come from the owner registers of the Catasto Generale della Toscana at the Archivio di Stato di Siena, published by the Regione Toscana (CASTORE). Later stages come from the 1832 tithe book, the 1841 census tables, a notice published by Ermenegildo Tamanti in the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 1868, historical land-register extracts from 1971 onward, and the estates’ own published histories. Where a step is not yet documented, the page says so. The full references are in the Palazzo Tamanti storybook and on the Sources & Evidence page; the farms themselves are described under Tamanti Poderi.
These pages are independent family-history research by Palazzo Tamanti. They are not written or endorsed by the wineries named.