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Other Stories of Montalcino

Builders, an architect in Rome, a prize for Brunello and the town’s own words

Not every story of Montalcino is a Tamanti story, but many of them ran within sight of the palazzo. This page gathers a few of the shorter histories from the storybook’s part on Montalcino and its people: the men who built and roofed the town’s churches, a Montalcino architect who won a prize in Rome, an early international honor for Brunello, and the scholar who saved the town’s own vocabulary.

A man from Montalcino in a neighboring vineyard, 1637

Gregory Hanlon’s study of nearby Montefollonico preserves a small court case of 1637. Bartolomeo di Vincenzo, described as being from Montalcino, was caught picking figs in another man’s vineyard. He argued that once the grapes had been harvested anyone might go in; the local magistrate disagreed and jailed him. It is not a Tamanti record, but it puts a named Montalcinese into the daily world of the early Tamanti landowners: vineyards, customary gleaning and contested rights, in a countryside where credit stood in for cash and a poor harvest could ruin a household.

The Paccagnini: builders, an architect in Rome and a prize for Brunello

The story of the Paccagnini, who roofed San Francesco in 1749, raised the cathedral bell tower in 1794–97, sent an architect to Rome and won a Grand Prix for Brunello at Bordeaux in 1904, now has its own page: The Paccagnini of Montalcino. In brief:

The men who kept the churches standing, 1749–1834

In the summer of 1749 the roof of San Francesco had become a danger to the church beneath it, with rotten timbers and openings that let in rain and snow. Work began on 3 July under Francesco Paccagnini, a master builder living in Montalcino who had come down from the mountains above Pistoia, and was finished by 25 September; the convent chronicle notes that the new roof was painted the color of peach blossom. It also keeps a story an account book would have left out: a workman, Carlo Signorini, fell from the church roof onto one chapel roof, then another, and finally to the ground, and got up unhurt. The friars gave the credit to Saint Anthony.

Later the Paccagnini changed the town’s skyline. Canon Vincenzo Chiarini’s description of the cathedral, written in 1817, names Tommaso Paccagnini as the designer of its new bell tower and Pietro Paccagnini and his son Angelo as its builders. The old tower had begun to come down in 1794; the new one was finished on 31 August 1797 at the expense of Bishop Giuseppe Pecci, and in October 1813 four bells cast in Florence rang together for the first time. Angelo Paccagnini went on to work on the rebuilding of the cathedral under the architect Agostino Fantastici. These were the bells Filandro Tamanti and his sons heard from the palazzo, and the walls under which Gaetano and Dr. Antonio saw the new cathedral open in 1834.

A Montalcino architect in Rome, 1805–1826

On 4 July 1805 the Accademia di San Luca gave out its prizes on Rome’s Capitoline Hill, and the third prize of the second class in architecture went to “Francesco Paccagnini Senese”, for a design of a cemetery for a great city that survives in the academy’s collection. This Francesco, born in 1780, was the son of Tommaso Paccagnini, the designer of the bell tower; father and son worked together at San Cristoforo in Siena after the earthquake of 1798, and the son went on to appointments in Rome and work on churches and a theater in Tuscany. He is very probably the architect named for the façade of the Madonna del Soccorso, and he should not be confused with the master builder of the same name who roofed San Francesco in 1749. Not every design was accepted: after the great flood at Tivoli in 1826 a commission doubted that his proposed wall could be built in so fast a river.

Riccardo Paccagnini and the reputation of wine, 1904

A diploma from Bordeaux records that at the city’s international exhibition of 1904 Riccardo Paccagnini received a Grand Prix for Brunello, one of the early international honors for the wine. He was also the author of a practical treatise on agriculture and winemaking addressed to landowners, tenant farmers, estate managers and agricultural institutions, the whole chain of people through whom farming knowledge passed in the age of the mezzadria. With an elaborate early Brunello label, these printed things in the town’s historical collection show how a Montalcino wine’s reputation traveled.

Alceste Angelini and the language of Montalcino

Alceste Angelini was born at Bibbiano, in the commune of Buonconvento, in 1920, the son of a shoemaker who made shoes for the farmers around Montalcino; as a boy he walked beside his father to deliver them. In 1947 he took his degree at Florence with a thesis on the vocabulary of Montalcino under the historian of the Italian language Bruno Migliorini. He became a teacher, a poet and a translator of Greek. The Quartiere Travaglio later published his Saggio di lessico montalcinese to save the words that changing habits were pushing aside: a different inheritance from a house or a field, keeping the voice in which the people of this story bargained, prayed and named their farms.

For the wider history of the town, see The Last Republic: Montalcino 1553–1559 and The Fortune That Came Too Late.

Sources

This page is drawn from the Palazzo Tamanti storybook (version 2.48, October 2026), chapter “Other stories of Montalcino”, where every fact carries a full archival reference. All connected families · Back to the Tamanti family history.