The main building at La Petraia, devoted to our apartment upstairs, four guest rooms, a kitchen and a dining room down, is a classic Tuscan casa colonica or farmhouse. There is nothing particularly architecturally refined about the casa colonica. This was a structure designed and built for function with the materials at hand. Begun between 1000 and 1100 as a tower of thick stone walls, it is now the product of centuries of expansion. Most probably it evolved first into a humble structure to afford a local enterprising inhabitant of Radda the opportunity to plant grains and raise animals, a sign of rural Italy's slow emergence from the Dark Ages. Later, as a feudal farm, one of twenty-five or so on an enormous estate, La Petraia was equipped with two stone out buildings, one a fienile or barn for the threshing and storage of grain and the other, a capana, or shed which, with its skirted foundation, may well have been at one time a tower. In closer proximity to the main house a row of enclosed stalls, known as the porcellaia, housed the pigs.

Today the main building stands proudly over the property supported by a series of terraces whose dry stone walls were painstakingly reconstructed over a four year period. It was an act of charity to the land that few in Chianti indulge in today, preferring to ignore the crumbling structures or to leave the work of rebuilding them to enormous excavators that place rows of giant rocks in their stead.

Part way through the process, we were told by a local that in the 18th century the Tuscans were world renown for their engineering expertise in the construction of stone terraces and drainage. Like the Roman aqueducts that still dot the Italian countryside, the slopes and angles of the walls and the flow of water were calculated and built with great precision.

Back then, he said, there might have been a hundred men who came to La Petraia to construct these walls. Today we must rely on the patience and persistence of three or four.